By Annie Holub
Arizona Daily Wildcat
January 30, 1998

Guns, gore and not much more

Photo © Holly Pictures Company. All Rights Reserved. Arizona Daily Wildcat Up against a big scary monster, the surviving folks aboard the Argonautica prepare for the worst. (Left to right) Famke Janssen, Kevin J. O'Connor, Treat Williams, Wes Studi and Anthony Heald.

by Annie Holub

The cruise industry has suffered a really intense blow during the past few months. What with Titanic and the new seafaring flick Deep Rising, nobody in their right mind is going to want to get on one of those boats. We've all seen way too many people living it up on luxury ships only to end up screaming and sliding down decks to their deaths in freezing cold water.

Deep Rising is basically Titanic combined with Tremors, that 1990 movie about strange underground monsters that eat people. Here you have a big huge ship, which is even proclaimed to be yet another "ship of dreams," and a big ugly sea monster that drinks people - it sucks out all their blood and then spits out the bones.

Yep, and you get to see a lot of that, too, lots of gooey human bones, all over the place. This is not a movie to watch after eating spaghetti.

Deep Rising is your typical thriller-action deal, right down to a soaking wet gun-toting chick in a white tank top. The weirdest thing about the movie is that all of the characters have really odd names that are impossible to remember, like "Trillian" and "Pantucci," including the ship and the monster. Since you can't keep track of anyone's name, the whole story becomes impersonal, which in turn makes enjoying all the thriller-action stuff easier.

The story is simple: the captain of the cruise ship Argonautica, played by Anthony Heald (Silence of the Lambs), wants to sink it in the middle of the South China sea so he can collect the insurance money. So, he hires a gang of ass-kicking brutes, including Djimon Hounson (Amistad) and Wes Studi (Dances With Wolves), to shut the ship down. They in turn hire an innocent, unknowing boat crew, composed of Treat Williams (The Devil's Own), Kevin J. O'Conner (Peggy Sue Got Married) and Una Damon (Gattaca), to take the brutes to the cruise ship. Except the unexpected happens: an unidentified sea object stops the ship for lunch. All the bad people die, all the good guys survive (except Leila, played by Damon). The sole original cruise passenger to survive is a beautiful girl, Trillian (played by Famke Janssen, whose credits include Goldeneye), and everything bad that could happen happens. This is all highly predictable, right down to the main good guy, Finnegan (Williams) saying, "Now what?" before the monster strikes again.

Which brings us to the main draw of the movie: the monster.

It's described as a freak mutation of a little sea creature that only gets to be palm-sized in normal ocean waters. But, as the movie informs us at the beginning, we're dealing with waters that would "hide the Himalayas," close to 40,000 feet deep. These little sea creatures have been known to swallow sharks when found in water merely 10,000 feet deep. So at 40,000 feet ... watch out folks.

This monster is smart, slimy and looks like an octopus. It attacks quickly, and responds rather well to high-tech Chinese machine guns. The coolest part of the entire movie is when they first shoot the tentacles of the monster - and one of its victims falls out. The audience watches in horror as his skin disintegrates while he screams, eyes wide in pain, and one of the bad guys cries, "It's Billy!!"

Deep Rising may already have been filed under "really bad movies not worth seeing," but if you want to go see a movie that is entertaining purely because of cool things like torpedoes, sea monsters, machine guns, gore and guts, explosions and chicks in white tanks tops, then Deep Rising meets all the qualifications. Worth is subjective, after all.