• Reviews

• All
• Music
• DVDs
• Live
• Cinema
• TV
• Books
• Comic Books
• Video Games

Aug 24, 2018 Web Exclusive By Stephen Danay

During one of the behind-the-scenes interviews on Kino Lorber’s new 20th anniversary Blu-ray release of Deep Rising, actor Anthony Heald speculates that the film’s release date - January 30th, 1998 - was largely responsible for its poor box office performance. Titanic had been released roughly six weeks prior and was already well on its way to becoming a zeitgeist-defining juggernaut, and certainly the most memorable film ever to be set on a cruise ship. Heald opines that Deep Rising - which follows a team of mercenaries who hijack the world’s most luxurious ocean liner only to find it overrun by enormous, man-eating sea worms - was simply one more film about luxury ocean going than the movie-going public could handle.

There’s some merit to that hypothesis, although the most plausible reason for Deep Rising’s box office failure - $11 million against a $45 million budget - is that it’s not a very good film, certainly by the standards of the average filmgoer. Even by the standards of b-movie junkies, Deep Rising is middling at best, more a goofy curio of a simpler time than an under-appreciated cult classic. It’s the third feature by writer/director Stephen Sommers, whose career began with live-action Disney adaptations like Tom and Huck and the 1994 version of The Jungle Book. The latter served as a template for his filmography, which attempts to marry the swashbuckling exuberance of Errol Flynn films with modern special effects. At its best, his kid-safe machismo meets gee-whiz effects aesthetic feels like if Howard Hawks made a movie with Ray Harryhausen. His only true success in this regard is his 1999 remake of The Mummy, which utilized adventure-serial pacing, some surprisingly durable CGI and a pair of winning lead performances from Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz to becoming a critical and commercial hit. It would be followed by a series of bloated, dopey duds that got more digitized as they went: The Mummy Returns, Van Helsing and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. But before all that, there was Deep Rising.

Shot over the summer of 1996 and delayed for nearly a year to incorporate further VFX work, Deep Rising is somewhat novel in its premise but wholly derivative in its execution. Its over-the-top off-screen blood sprays and monster attacks by way of Dutch angle zooms are pure Sam Raimi. The use of erupting floorboards to signal the approach the creatures is lifted directly from Tremors. The scene of the mercenaries needlessly firing off their made up machine guns in unison is straight out of Predator. There’s even a green-tinted underwater scene that mirrors a similar scene in Alien: Resurrection, which was produced simultaneously and beat Deep Rising to theaters by a mere two months.

Sommers patches this motley collection of influences together with a deeply silly script and a bizarre cast of character actors. As the swashbuckling wiseass hero John Finnegan, Sommers cast Treat Williams, already looking a bit too old for this shit. Williams has the appropriate twinkle in his eye and tongue planted firmly in cheek, but never quite nails the balance between tough guy posturing and bug-eyed goofiness that Fraser would perfect in The Mummy. Even his catchphrase - a sardonic “Now what?” - feels phoned in. More successful is Famke Janssen as the improbably named Trillian St. James, a high-class pickpocket who survives the initial infestation after being locked in the brig. Flirty, charming and not afraid to look silly, Janssen shows more personality in this than she did in half a dozen X-Men films, to the point that she’d probably have made a better Finnegan than Williams. The implausibly diverse team of mercenaries - led by the ever stoic Wes Studi - include a pre-Gladiator Djimon Honsou, Maori actor Cliff Curtis - here actually playing Maori instead of his usual Latin American or Arab - and late Australian tough guy and Mortal Kombat alum Trevor Goddard doing his beefy, Australian Colin Farrell routine. Oddest of all is Kevin J. O’Conner as Joey, the comic relief sidekick/tech guy. Somewhere between a Gen X Peter Lorre and a Rick and Morty character, O’Conner became a fixture of Sommer’s films going forward; his twitchy nervous energy is fun here, but the character is badly overwritten to the point that you’ll start wishing his last minute escapes from the creatures would take a turn for the worse.

Kino Lorber has assembled a treasure trove of extras for anyone else who has a bizarre sense of nostalgia for this film. In addition to a commentary track featuring Sommers and new interviews with several of the actors, there’s several interviews with the effects team that shed some interesting light on the changing nature of action and horror films in the late nineties. With its elevator pitch premise, B-movie aesthetic and then cutting edge special effects - some of which actually hold up! - Deep Rising feels like a bizarre throwback to a time when studios would fun special effects-driven action films that weren’t part of a franchise or starring The Rock. Critics weren’t wrong to pan it at the time, but twenty years later it’s just quaint, bloody fun.

www.kinolorber.com/product/deep-rising-20th-anniversary-special-edition-blu-ray