Deepstar Six (1989)

Deepstar Six is an underwater base, six miles down, charged with a) installing some nuclear missiles in submarine silos and b) doing a bit of marine research if they have the time and it doesn't inconvenience the arms race too much. Excavations unleash a fast-moving prehistoric arthropod that looks like a giant, scaly, three-lipped prawn, which attacks the base killing people off one at a time in the approved Alien fashion. Our wet heroes' problems are not helped much by the presence on board of a twitching coward (Miguel Ferrer) who does everything wrong - from exploding the missiles underwater and wrecking their escape route to accidentally jamming a raft-inflating cartridge into a scientist who blows up like a balloon - and gets more people killed than the creature.

Sean S. Cunningham is best known as the man who kicked off the Friday the 13th series, and this underwater monster movie - the first of whole shoal of similar beasties heading our way this year - is virtually a rerun of the initial outing, down to the hokey but still effective last-minute shock sequence. Sweaty actors get through their laughable establishing dialogue, act like total idiots when the crisis starts and get horribly done in by the monster, the psycho, the water or faulty equipment.

If you're a fan of the old Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea series, then you might find this diverting. It follows the conventions of that show, including the blatantly silly monster suits, the consoles that shoot out sparks whenever anything goes wrong, the female characters who are supposed to be high-powered geniuses but act like nervous teenagers, and the sprays of water that come through the walls whenever the sub is ruptured. However, in a criminal omission, the sonar is replaced by a dodgy computer animation effect. I mean, how can you make an underwater monster movie without a pinging sonar? Some people have no respect for Art.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: City Limits

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