Deep Rising (1998)
Directed by Stephen Sommers
- Awesomely funny, frequently very gross and laughably violent, Deep Rising is pure pulp cinema, the kind of movie that feels much more genuinely “b-movie” than either of the Rodriguez and Tarantino “Grindhouse” movies. Death Proof is too cool and Planet Terror is too creatively bonkers to be considered true B-movies and not all the faux-film-scratches and celluloid burns in the world can fix that.
- Deep rising is genuinely in love with campy monster-movie action and brings along a host of very fun, well-cast characters to deal with an indescribable tentacle monster that interrupts a heist on a cruise ship somewhere in the Asian Pacific.
- The pace is fast, the humor is expertly woven into the action and horror, and it’s truly among the most “leave your brain at the door” movies ever. No need to over-analyze or question, this movie doesn’t care about anything but the next thrill and I’m so thankful for it.
- I saw this movie for the first time before it was released back in 1998. The studio hosted some kind of surprise movie preview that I fell into and comment cards were distributed, along with t-shirts to bribe us into saying something nice. We hadn’t heard of it and had no clue what we were getting into, but the bribe of the shirt – though appreciated – was in no way necessary. My friends and I all adored the movie and our comment cards reflected as much.
- Treat Williams is perfectly cast as a rogue boat captain John Finnegan who runs questionable transport across dangerous waters; a kind of Han Solo of the open seas. Funny enough, Harrison Ford was the original choice for the role, but he turned it down and when he did so, the budget was cut significantly!
- Joining Williams are some great character actors, including Wes Studi and Djimon Hansou as tough-as-nails mercenaries, Anthony Heald as a slimy luxury liner designer and X-Men‘s Jean Gray herself, Fammke Jansen as a fetching and witty thief who takes aim at robbing the ship’s vault and ends up, thankfully for her, in the brig where she manages to avoid being killed when everyone else on the ship is by a monster from the deep.
- Jansen is so good here – funny, charismatic and able to keep up with the boys in the many, many physically demanding action sequences designed by Sommers with apparent glee. Jansen also strikes up fantastic chemistry with Williams, whose world-weariness in no way seems forced. He’s certainly the right guy to play someone who has seen a lot of shit and cannot believe he’s ended up where he has, as being in this movie had to have felt like a career detour.
- That said, Williams clearly had a sense of humor and a love for genre pictures – remember the forementioned Dead Heat? – and here he’s loving the opportunity to both play a rogue and get close to Jansen.
- Final note on the cast – the scene-stealer supporting actor Kevin J. O’Conner is the absolute stand out in this flick as Captain Finnegan’s second in command, Joey Pantucci, a constantly whining but completely hilarious mechanic that’s constantly in way over his head and knows it. O’Conner’s timing in every scene is perfection, and he defines the term “comedic relief,” although to be fair, Jansen, Williams and even Wes Studi manage to earn some laughs as Sommer’s screenplay finds the humor in even the most grim of situations.
- Incidentally, O’Conner’s career is a study of the truly bizarre, vascillating between roles in Paul Thomas Anderson movies like There WIll be Blood and The Master to a turn in one of the worst direct-to-video “movies” I’ve ever seen: Exorcism at 60,000 Feet which also features Adrienne Barbeau, Bai Ling and fucking Lance Henricksen.
- Best scene in Deep Rising? Has to be the elevator moment with “The Girl from Ipanema” playing and O’Conner singing along to it after they’ve just encountered the monster. I’m not sure I’ve laughed harder at many scenes in movies as this one.
- Best kill? There’s a scene where a half-digested merc who is somehow still alive is cut from one of the sucker-tentacle things. It’s so unbelievably gross and funny simultaneously, which is why this is among my very favorite b-movies.
- I cannot believe how wrong Roger Ebert was about this movie, placing it on his “most hated” list. This from the guy who wrote Beyond the Vallery of the Dolls? How did he not see the entertainment value of this insane horror/action/comedy hybrid?
Treat Williams’s career
- He could have been a contender! Was rising around the same time as DeNiro and Pacino, but had the looks of Warren Beatty. He says cocaine addiction and a preference for partying rather than working led to the derailment of his career.
- He’s won quite a few awards, but hilariously what I always remember him for the 1995 buddy-cop film with a twist, Dead Heat in which he starred opposite Joe Piscopo as a dead cop named, ahem, Roger Mortis.
The poster which boasts the work of Rob Bottin
- No one else in the movie was much of a draw, so there was a poster created which boasts that the movie comes from the special effects team that worked on Total Recall and Star Wars!
- Bottin’s work, along with the visual effects work from ILM and Dreamquest images
- ILM had a “Stephen Sommers scale” that they rated the level of challenge a movie would bring in terms of its visual effects and CG. The four parts of the scale, from lowest to highest, are “What the Shot Needs”, “What the Computers Can Handle”, “Oh my God, the Computers Are About to Crash”, and finally “What Stephen Wants”.
Amazing Music Score from Jerry Goldsmith! It’s got this bouncy, brassy, audacious score that is pure action-adventure by way of a bossa-nova.
- Goldsmith is best known for his scores to the original Alien, The Omen, Poltergeist, Gremlins and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, among countless others, and he is the highest level of pedigree on this crazy flick, but not the only well-respected contributor
Stephen Sommers career
- Most know him for the first two Brendan Fraser Mummy movies and rightfully so – they possess the very same swashbuckling adventure and tongue-in-cheek comedy of Deep Rising, but with a much bigger budget.
- In fact, Stephen Sommers is one of those directors – like Renny Harlin and Stephen Hopkins who I root for even as they don’t make particularly great films. Sommers, after the Mummy movies, ended up making stuff like Van Helsing with Hugh Jackman and GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, as well as a movie Mike hates, but I like – the live action version of Disney’s The Jungle Book. Harlin, after Die Hard 2, did Cliffhanger, The Long Kiss Goodnight and Deep Blue Sea, but just about everything else on his resume is ROUGH, ALL CAPS. And finally, Stephen Hopkins, who did the absolutely batshit Predator 2, followed by the equally batshit Judgement Night and would later direct half of the first – and best? – season of 24.
- I mention these three because movies like Predator 2, Deep Blue Sea and Deep Rising are a freaking blast. They’re dumb, crazy action movies where the willing suspension of disbelief is more than required, it’s like air or water – they cannot exist without it. And I don’t mind. Sometimes you have to shut off your damn brain and have a great time with the creative spin some filmmakers will bring to things. That’s Deep Rising and I’m glad – Mike – that you decided to bring it onto the show because, as you said when you assigned me the movie: we love bad movies! It’s why we make this show!
Bottom Five Nicolas Unintentional Porn Titles:
5.) Adventures in Babysitting (1987)
dir. Chris Columbus
Clocking in at number 5 on my list is the one and only Chris Columbus – again, after our last episode’s two-fer of Pixels and Home Alone for bottom five bullies. This time it’s his directorial debut, 1987’s much-adored Adventures in Babysitting. Starring a very young Elizabeth Shue, who I’ll get back to in a minute, along with Vincent D’Onofrio, Penelope Anne Miller, George Newbern and Bradly Whitford, this wack-a-doodle adventure comedy finds a babysitter navigating the mean streets of Chicago while trying to find a distressed friend at the same time as she trues keep her eye on a gaggle of suburban brats. It’s a fun movie, but that TITLE? Yeah, it’s 100% porn-fodder without even the slightest of alterations. All the ingredients are present: hot babysitter. A tow truck driver named “Handsome” John Pruitt. A club where the babysitter has to “perform” before she is allowed to leave. The gang stumbling across a fraternity house party. One of the kids strikes up a friendship with a prostitute. COME ON – This thing writes itself. That said, the real reason I chose this was because of a comment I read on the Ain’t it Cool message board over twenty-years ago written by one “Jerky McJerk” who explained, and I quote, “I’d love to give Elizabeth Shue the ol’ dog in the bathtub trick.” I don’t know what that is exactly, but it definitely sounds like it would 1/ be fun and 2/ be in a movie called “Adventures in Babysitting” that’s rated a lot harder than PG-13.
4.) Freaky Friday (1976)
dir. Gary Nelson
What’s more porn than a movie called Freaky Friday? Again, we’ve not only got a title that could go – as is – onto a seedy XXX marquee, but we’ve also go a fully-baked porno concept: a mother and daughter switch bodies and hijinks ensue! Not going to lie, while the newer cast of a 19 year-old Lindsay Lohan swapping bodies with early 2000’s Jamie Lee Curtis sounds custom written for my pervy ass, I had to go with the older title as it’s the OGH and because there’s something sort of hot about a buttoned-up Barbara Harris type getting all cozy with her daughter’s high school crush. But the real reason I chose the 1976 version of this flick is due to director Gary Nelson, who by coincidence, has two… ahem… entries on my bottom five!
3.) The Black Hole (1979)
dir. Gary Nelson
Somehow, and I know not how, director Gary Nelson of Freaky Friday fame somehow also directed Number 3 on my list. And while it may be Disney’s answer to Star Wars and Star Trek, but The Black Hole is also an impeccably naughty title for a movie and the film itself is only slightly less inappropriate for its intended children’s audience than an adult film with the same name, given this is a gothic space opera filled with scientific and philosophical pontification and terrifying robot-human hybrids revealed to have no eyes when their masks are removed. Plus, it stars Anthony Perkins and Ernest Borgnine! What screams “This one’s for you, kids” more than Norman Bates and the title character from McHale’s Navy? The title is obvious and I’ll let your imagination go where no man – or no one? – has gone before, but I’ll leave you with this line from the movie which, when taken out of context could mean… so many things (clip of the movie) Dr. Hans Reinhardt: If the data on my returning probe matches my computerized calculations, I will travel where no man has dared to go.
Dr. Alex Durant: Into the black hole?
Dr. Hans Reinhardt: In – through – And beyond!
2.) Dirty Angels (2024)
dir. Martin Campbell
Not to be confused with Angels with Dirty Faces or the Home Alone spoof, Angels with Filthy Souls – Keep the change you Filthy animal – I felt like I was reaching too far back into cinema history with my first three picks, so I wanted something more recent to balance things out and show that this habit of naming movies unintentionally perverted titles is still going strong! Action director Martin Campbell, best known for his two Bond outings – Goldeneye and Casino Royale – last year released a film that 100% didn’t have to be about a mostly-female special ops unit that poses as medics to save a group of teenage hostages. That said, if it WAS about something else – and I’ll let your mind do the imagining here, because the title “Dirty Angels” leaves A LOT to the imagination, I would argue that you should retain at least part of the cast of the real movie. Eva Green? Maria Bakalova? Ruby Rose? Yes please! I’d like to see THAT version of “Dirty Angels” post-haste! Is the actual film good? You know, I really like Martin Campbell movies! They’ve got a very particular kind of intense action and surprisingly gritty violence usually with a pretty well-baked political intrigue plot. The Foreigner remains one of my absolute favorite Jackie Chan performances and The Protege, starring the American-born Hong Kong starlet Maggie Q is a fun, action romp. But speaking of romps… Dirty Angels? It’s a title sent right from porn heaven.
1.) Come and See (1985)
dir. Elem Klimov (ee-lem Klee-moV)
Is it the single-most harrowing war film ever made, or is it a porno? This should be a funny title, but 1985’s Come and See is considered a searing indictment of fascism that was at one point mandatory viewing for those in East Germany, the film unflinchingly tells a coming-of-age story set against the Russian military’s stand against the Nazi’s during World War II. It’s filled with horrifying imagery and events all seen and experienced by young Florya whose youthful face grows more and more haggared as the film wears on. Getting it’s title from the Book of Revelations, in reference to bearing witness to the horror brought to the world by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Come and See should probably be required viewing for our current Jr. Nazi order of brain-dead, red hat-wearing lemmings who follow – blindly – the indecencies wrought by their dear leader. But no, more likely to be seen by our attention-span-deprived, history-deficient and porn-addled “Christian Warrior Class” is “Come and See,” a bland mess of bodies smashing in faux ecstasy shot under hot lights on bad video with zero skill and even less intimacy. Porn can be beautiful, fun and exhilarating, but I wanted to end this list with a real bottom five title – a movie that should be seen and understood and, more than likely, the thing that almost every American has seen way, way more of. The Book of Revelations may yet prove correct. Come and See indeed.