Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. In less than two weeks I'll be stepping foot on board Royal Caribbean's Brilliance of the Seas to take my very first cruise. I'll be taking part in the first ever floating Comic-Con, called Fan2Sea, and I'll be moderating a Stranger Things panel with Production Designer Bill Davis as well as introducing a screening of Jaws while actually out on the open ocean. That's pretty neat, right?
Since movies are how I prep for just about any new real life experience, I figured I'd bust out some movies set on or around a cruise ship to get an idea of what I'll be in for. Naturally, the first title to pop into my mind was Deep Rising, Stephen Sommers' cheeseball comedic action horror movie starring Treat Williams.
Since I've never been on a cruise before I was paying attention for clues to help me on my maiden voyage. Here are the top 5 cruise tips I walked away from Deep Rising with:
1 – I need to pack my suit and practice my maniacal laughter for the “we're so stinking rich” speech the guy running the ship's operations will give at the fancy casino on board.
2 - Should we encounter water monsters, the safest place on the ship is in food storage which will have unrefrigerated, but apparently still okay to eat, trays of sushi and is insulated enough that they won't be able to sniff me out.
3 – Said water monsters don't like the heat, an aspect that was ignored by most of the supposedly smart mercs despite seeing the tentacles shrink away from heat over and over again.
4 – If up against a mysterious sea creature, I must make sure to seek out the sleaziest person still alive and he'll randomly have an encyclopedic knowledge of all marine life and can pinpoint what exactly this thing is even if no man has ever seen one this big and lived to tell about it.
5 – I must take note of where the jet skis are located as they're pretty much lifeboats but 10x cooler and more agile so you can avoid being grabbed by toothy tentacles should the need arise.
I must have seen bits and pieces of this movie on cable since its 1998 release, but I'll be damned if I haven't seen it in its entirety since I saw it at the movie theater. My memory of the film was that it was silly, but fun and that Treat Williams hams it up pretty damn good. My memory was not wrong.
Stephen Sommers wrote and directed this film, which is some kind of telepod accident amalgam of Die Hard, Predator, Aliens and The Poseidon Adventure.
Treat Williams is the no-questions-asked Captain of a little boat hired by a bunch of mercenaries to go to very specific “middle of nowhere” coordinates. Williams is totally going for a very Han Solo reluctant hero vibe here and it's impossible to watch this movie now and not think of Nathan Fillion, who perfected that goofy, sarcastic tough guy archetype a half-decade later.
I was surprised at how many of the bad guy mercenaries were totally recognizable now. You've got Djimon Hounsou (who followed up Amistad with this movie, by the way. Oops.) as the cocky loudmouth, Guy Ritchie favorite Jason Flemyng as the twitchy one, Cliff Curtis as the horny merc who won't shut up about wanting to sex everything up, Clifton Powell as the trigger-happy smartass, Trevor Goddard (Kano from the Mortal Kombat movie) as the Australian one and Wes Studi, one of our best Native American actors, playing the tough asshole leader of the Mercs.
It's an interesting mix of nationalities and they're surprisingly fleshed out considering how many archetypes Sommers is trying to jam into one movie. There's very little filling-in-the-blanks exposition, which means we're discovering who these characters are through action, the smarter, my effective way of character-writing. Yes, I'm giving this cheesy-ass B-movie a compliment for smart writing and I mean it, too!
That doesn't mean I think the writing is particularly deep or original, but not every movie needs to break the mold. I'm a big fan of movies that just want to entertain you for 90 minutes and do it in fun, expectation-defying ways, which this film absolutely does.
Watching it fresh a few things stuck out to me. One, the structure is totally bonkers. If this film was made today I have a feeling we'd stay either completely with Williams' boat for hire with the mystery of their destination being the focus of the first act and the revelation of the completely fucked up luxury cruise ship the big reveal to pull us into act 2 or we'd instead be getting to know those onboard the cruise ship before they're attacked by evil tentacle monsters. The way it is now Sommers splits the first act between the two stories and lessens the impact of the surprise supernatural element.
I mean, they knew they were selling this movie on the monsters, so I guess there wouldn't be too many people they could trick into thinking this was a Die Hard-ish action movie, but since the whole beginning seems built on misleading the viewer about what kind of movie they're getting it's still an odd choice.
This rewatch also underlined just how good Jerry Goldsmith's score was. The man was a master, even with his less iconic film work.
Another odd choice is how the film establishes Williams' core team of trusted crew members and then just leaves one of them, the badass Una Damon, behind to die in a brutal way after establishing her as both a badass independent woman and the emotional cornerstone of the goofier Joey Pantucci character, played by Kevin J. O'Connor. It's another case of the movie seeming to promise one thing and then getting distracted by something else and leaving a thread behind.
Damon's death scene is one of the best in the movie in terms of staging (and it doesn't hurt they they shoehorn in an obvious Jaws nod right before she checks out), but it happens away from her group, which includes her boyfriend, leaving the revelation of her death until the very end where it gets no emotional impact.
I know, I'm nitpicking an almost 20 year old movie about giant spine tentacles digesting rich people on a cruise ship, but it's one of the only sour notes this revisit hit for me and it's something I felt I had to discuss when looking back at it.
I have very little problem with the rest of the character interaction in the film. In fact, I was surprised by just how much I liked the group that has to depend on each other to survive, even Famke Janssen's random thief sexpot turned Treat Williams fangirl. Her character is cartoony, but fits in the movie she's in and Janssen, still hot off her GoldenEye slingshot into stardom, charms her way through an otherwise underwritten character.
There's a fantastic moment that I'm still thinking about a couple days after this revisit and that involves Wes Studi's death scene. This comes after Studi and O'Connor are running from the monster and Studi, in line with his selfish character, shoots O'Connor in the leg in order to slow down the ravenous monsters chasing them down the hallway and allowing him to escape.
O'Connor manages to leap into a dumbwaiter and a few scenes later the tables are turned when Studi is being consumed by one of the chompy tentacles and O'Connor's bleeding heart can't leave him to his fate, even though the man tried to kill him a few minutes earlier. So, O'Connor gives him a gun and instead of using it to try to free himself Studi instead takes a “fuck you” shot at O'Connor. He misses.
Half his body in the maw of the monster and being digested already Studi turns the gun on himself only to hear a click. He wasted his one shot at a quick death by being a vindictive, mean asshole. That's what I mean I when I complimented the writing earlier. That's totally within character the whole way and leads to an audience pleasing moment of a scumbag paving the way for his own comeuppance.
Now that I think about it, Deep Rising would make a good double bill with the original Anaconda. Both movies are cheesy as hell and from an era when the studios would make this upper mid-budget horror flicks. They also both have questionable early CGI monsters that like to swallow their victims whole and digest them slowly.
Deep Rising is an easy movie to just throw on and have fun with, especially with it's super fun ending (which is essentially the beginning of Lost). Enough time has passed since I saw it that it oddly hit some nostalgia buttons I wasn't anticipating. From the early CG to the shitty composite shots to the specific grain of the film to Anthony Heald playing his trademark sleazeball... all of it screamed my high school years to me in a way I wasn't expecting.
There was a lot of big studio aquatic horror going on around this time. This, Virus and the remake of Ghost Ship all jump to mind. Deep Rising hit a tone that neither of those managed. It's not at all scary, really, but it is fun and because of that the questionable digital effects kind of play into the pulpy feel of the movie instead of distract away from a more serious flick.
This was definitely a great way to start off my Cruise-themed programming leading up the big Fan2Sea adventure. Got a few more classics on the list, like Friday the 13th Part VIII – Jason Takes Manhattan, the original Poseidon Adventure (naturally), Juggernaut (haven't seen this one) and, of course, Speed 2: Cruise Control.
Hopefully I can squeeze all of them in before I take off. I'll watch and write-up as many of them as possible if you care to follow along. Stay tuned!
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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