DeepStar Six (Sean S. Cunningham, 1989)

There must have been something in the water in late-'80s Hollywood that caused so many filmmakers to make movies about something in the water. The 1989 release schedule was crammed up the wazoo with movies about deep ocean crews encountering something unusual under the sea. (Speaking of under the sea, The Little Mermaid was also released in 1989.) On the big-budget side, James Cameron followed up his mega-hit Aliens with The Abyss, a story about a SEAL team encountering aliens in the depths of the Cayman Trough, released in August of '89. In April, ultra-low-budget king Roger Corman retooled an unfilmed 1982 screenplay to cash in on the fad with Lords of the Deep, about aliens attacking an underwater colony of humans. (Hilarious fact about that movie: future award-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski was on the second unit crew and was fired because his footage looked too good, making the rest of the film look even worse by comparison, though they did eventually use portions of it.) In March, Rambo: First Blood Part II and Tombstone director George P. Cosmatos got in on the undersea action with his mid-budget Leviathan, the story of a deep-sea mining crew battling a giant monster in the Adriatic Sea.

Friday the 13th director Sean S. Cunningham shrewdly (some may say cynically) realized how many of these movies were on the '89 release schedule and hatched a plan to deliver a low-budget (in Hollywood terms) but professional sea monster movie as quickly as possible to beat them all into theaters. He succeeded, and DeepStar Six premiered on January 13, 1989, to mostly negative reviews and mediocre box office. (To continue this deep-sea circle jerk, DeepStar Six screenwriter Lewis Abernathy would later snag an acting role in Abyss director Cameron's Titanic.) It's far from an original piece of work and hits a lot of the familiar beats and grooves of the crew-on-a-mission movies, but seen through a 2025 lens, DeepStar Six is a solid and entertaining action/sci-fi/horror movie of modest budget like they used to make 'em before everything had to be green-screen world-building Best Buy-lighting-looking eleventy billion dollar horseshit. Is mainstream Hollywood filmmaking so washed up that mediocre films from the '80s now look like shining gems? Possibly. (Just so you don't think I'm an old man yelling at a cloud, I do think dozens of great movies are still being made every year, but very few of them within the Hollywood system or the major independents.)

DeepStar Six takes place on an experimental undersea facility run by the U.S. navy with a crew made up of navy personnel and civilian contractors. The facility serves two purposes for the navy: a place to test underwater colonization and a location to construct a storage area for nuclear missiles. The current crew is finishing up the last week of a six-month assignment that was supposed to be just four months. Some of them are handling the extended duration better than others, but no one is going nutzo yet. I would like to call the crew a ragtag collection of misfits so crazy they just might work, but, alas, each one is a highly skilled professional with a specific duty, played by a slew of recognizable working actors, the most famous probably being Miguel Ferrer. "Hey, it's that person from that thing," you'll say before checking IMDb.

Those people from those things include head submarine pilot McBride (B.J. and the Bear and My Two Dads' Greg Evigan), Navy SEAL Joyce Collins (Nancy Everhard, of much episodic TV), facility captain Laidlaw (Hill Street Blues' Taurean Blacque), mechanic Snyder (Twin Peaks' Ferrer), marine biologist Scarpelli (Fame's Nia Peeples), submarine co-pilot Richardson (The Hand that Rocks the Cradle's Matt McCoy; he also played Lloyd Braun on Seinfeld), doctor Diane Norris (St. Elsewhere and Ferris Bueller's Day Off's Cindy Pickett), head of the nuclear missile project Van Gelder (The Gods Must Be Crazy's Marius Weyers), geologist Burciaga (Being There and the Raimi Spider-Man movies' Elya Baskin), and two more submarine pilots who control the smaller exploration pods, Hodges (Riptide's Thom Bray, sporting a bizarre and possibly fake beard) and Osborne (Friday the 13th's Ronn Carroll).

This is a well-oiled, competent crew, but a few cracks are showing. Snyder is stressed, anxious, and fed up with being below the surface for so long, and Van Gelder, under tight deadline pressure to finish the missile storage platform by the end of the week, has become a raging prick. In other unprofessional moves, McBride and Collins are hooking up, and so are Scarpelli and Richardson. Despite two couples onboard, DeepStar Six goes light on DeepStar Sex. Even the shower scene is shot from the neck up. It's a soft R rating.

Speaking of the soft R rating, the women in the cast, with the mild exception of a bit of cheesecake stuff from Peeples in the early scenes, are given a refreshingly equal footing with the men. They are just as competent, efficient, intelligent, and capable, and not in a condescending, backslapping, sisters are doing it for themselves way. No big deal is made out of this. No special attention is called to it. It's just the way things are. A bit surprising for 1988/89. 

Back to the movie. When a large cavern is discovered under the proposed missile platform site, Van Gelder rebuffs both Burciaga's requests to run some safety tests and Scarpelli's urgently delivered pleas to study the cavern's marine life and build the platform somewhere else. (Why are they just now building the platform in the last week, and why didn't they know the cavern was there until now?) Van Gelder wants to build his damn missile platform, and since he's in charge of that part of the job, everyone else has to like it or lump it. His plan? Collapse the cavern with explosives and build the damn platform right where the navy wants it, damn it.

As you can probably guess, this depth charge plan goes awry when a sea beast emerges from the cavern ready to fuck shit up. The rest of the movie contains desperate attempts by the crew to repair the damaged equipment, fend off the sea monster (a sort of giant crab version of the predator from Predator), and return to the ocean's surface. Few will survive. If a character reminisces about how much they love their family or the double cheeseburger at their favorite hometown greasy spoon or the smell of the mountain air on the porch of their New Hampshire farmhouse, you know that character is not long for this world.

Yeah, this structure is overly familiar, but the cast plays it seriously and has good chemistry, both the repair/rescue and monster attack scenes are tension-filled nail-biters, and the whole thing is pleasant to look at, with a nice mix of slick professionalism and low-budget handmade craftsmanship. Most of the practical special effects look pretty good, but the cheapier, cheesier stuff is pretty charming, too. I'll take that over the dead digital sameness of the modern Hollywood product any day.

I love the retro-futurist quality of practical effect sci-fi, where the imagined future and the time-stamped year of the film's shooting are fused together. DeepStar Six imagines a future years ahead of ours that also looks exactly like 1988, and I love that. Hollywood movies, even bad ones, used to be time capsules. I don't even know what the hell anything is anymore. Some cloud-storage noplace located everywhere and nowhere. The 21st century has made me a crabby little bitch, but I like texture and goop (not the Gwyneth Paltrow Goop). I just wasn't made for these times.

Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975)

If you're a person who primarily thinks of film as a storytelling medium that brings the written word to life through plot mechanics and relatable characters with understandable motivations and behaviors, Dario Argento movies will probably frustrate you. If, like me, you think that film is first, foremost, and last a visual medium, that the collision of image, performance, technique, experience, and emotion in the frame is infinitely more important than what's on the page, and that each film has its own internal dream logic so who cares if it doesn't always make real world sense, then you possibly agree with me that Dario Argento, in his peak years between the early 1970s and late 1980s, was one of the great visual stylists and that his strongest movies are a near-constant delight for the eyeballs.

Deep Red, like most of that stretch of Argento from 1970's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to 1987's Opera, is full of rich, deep colors, ridiculously powerful images, graceful and unpredictable camera movements, especially in POV shots (though Argento is also down to get rough and graceless for maximum effect), gorgeous (or gorgeously garish) set and costume design, a wildly memorable score, refreshingly illogical character behavior, violent murders that are simultaneously brutal and beautiful in their choreography, and a frame that never shows you anything pedestrian or boring simply to move the plot along. Every single person, place, and thing onscreen is of maximum visual interest, even the bathroom tile. When an image veers too close to conventionality or repetition, Argento simply amps up the heavy baroque prog funk of Goblin on the soundtrack to keep it sassy. Each time I watch it, I get less and less interested in the murder mystery at its center and more and more thrilled by its style, technique, and momentum.

The relatively silly plot contains some of the standard traits of the Italian giallo — a black-gloved killer in a trench coat, an ex-pat eyewitness to one of the murders who becomes obsessed with solving the case, violently elaborate deaths, and useless cops — but I never get tired of these old standards, and, anyway, Argento is just using them as the hanger for a pretty spectacular outfit. (I heard some people think anything using an em-dash is automatically AI, but I was using the em-dash when AI was in short pants, son. This post was not written by AI, but it was written by a.i. (an idiot).)

Blow-Up's David Hemmings stars as Marcus Daly, a British pianist teaching at a conservatory in Rome. While walking the strangely isolated streets near his apartment, Marcus stops to chat with a fellow pianist, Carlo (Gabriele Lavia), who is a drunken mess. He's downing drinks on the street outside the Edward Hopper-esque Blue Bar and engaging in a self-pity session about having to scrounge for gigs while his friend teaches at the conservatory. A horrible scream interrupts the conversation, startling both men. Not seeing anything, Carlo shuffles back to his drinking spot, but Marcus takes a second look toward the window of his apartment building and catches part of the murder of the woman who rents the apartment below his, a Lithuanian psychic named Helga Ullmann (Macha Meril). Marcus rushes into the building to help but is too late.

While being held in the apartment for questioning, Marcus meets eccentric, free-spirited journalist Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi). Gianna and Marcus develop a friendship/friendship with benefits/rivalry/rivalry with benefits, and the two become a sort of comedic odd couple trying to beat each other at solving the murder. Nicolodi is always great in her then-partner Argento's movies (and she wrote one of his best, Suspiria), but her performance here is probably my favorite of the batch. I love the scene of her driving him around in her rapidly deteriorating car, and the scene where she beats him twice at arm wrestling (called "Indian wrestling" here for some reason) after he talks shit about women's lib.

The rest of the movie contains several classic Argento setpieces, Marcus the pianist's reckless disregard for his own hands, improper handling of material in libraries and archives (my archivist/librarian/records manager wife was not a fan of this), loud birds, weird dolls (including a mechanical one), great architecture, bold eye makeup, artistically satisfying mega-violence, and memorable appearances from Clara Calamai as Carlo's oddball ex-actress mother, redheaded child star of multiple '70s Italian horror films Nicoletta Elmi playing another really weird kid, and Geraldine Hooper, an androgynous woman who further plays with gender fluidity here in her performance as an androgynous man.

A side tangent: Argento doesn't get enough credit (and was incorrectly labeled a homophobe by centrist liberals whose goal is mainstream respectability and performative uplift) for his films' use of gay, bisexual, gender-fluid, and trans characters, even when they're a bit exaggerated (the gay private detective in Four Flies on Grey Velvet is so over the top he was criticized as a stereotype by some critics, but he's presented as one of the most likable, honest, and life-filled characters in the movie). Even when he misses the mark a bit, I get the impression Argento's portrayal of these characters is coming from a place of genuine curiosity and relaxed acceptance.

Deep Red is top-tier Argento for me. I'm in love with the look of this thing from start to finish. Even if you're a plot-based person, I think you'll at least say "that was cool" a minimum of six times per viewing. It's just so satisfying to watch a scene and think, "I love the colors. I love the clothes. I love the makeup. I love the damn bathroom tile. I love the way the camera moves. I love the music. I love the construction of the shot. I love the wide shots. I love the closeups. I love the way the scene builds. I love the juxtaposition of this shot and that shot. I love everything I'm seeing and hearing right now." People used to make stuff like this. Okay, one guy used to make stuff like this. With a couple dozen notable exceptions each year, where have all the good times gone?