Deep Rising / The Puppet Masters (Double Feature) Reviews

Mill Creek's budget-priced region-free Blu-ray double-bill offers one terrific creature feature that's worth the price of the disc on its own with a misfired belated adaptation of a classic 50s sci-fi novel that's best regarded as an extra feature you don't have to sit through.

Hated by critics and ignored by audiences, Deep Rising is a terrific creature feature that plays a bit like The Poseidon Adventure with added tentacles. The film was originally intended as a Harrison Ford vehicle before opting for the considerably less expensive Treat Williams, who gives the kind of performance that shows he could have made a terrific Han Solo himself as the captain of a hunk of junk ship whose "If you've got the fare, we don't care" philosophy is just setting him up for a fall. Hired to take a very intense Wes Studi and his veritable United Nations of mercenaries - Jason Flemyng, Cliff Curtis and Djimon Hounsou among them - and their cargo of torpedoes to a mystery destination that turns out to be Anthony Heald's millionaire's pleasure liner, things quickly go downhill when they find it dead in the water and covered in blood and themselves on the menu for something very large that's infested the ship...

It's one of those monster movies that doesn't reinvent the wheel but just has fun with the usual clichés, throwing in a novel creature to work its way through the invaders and survivors, plenty of wisecracks and a cast that's clearly having a whale of a time, Studi giving the viciously tentacled beast a run for its money in the pitiless stakes and Treat Williams and Famke Jansen's thief providing enough likeability and screen chemistry to compensate for Kevin J. O'Connor's occasionally irritating comic relief sidekick shtick. The much-criticised CGi effects are actually pretty good for much of the picture, though there's a noticeable drop in quality in some of the later sequences (more a case of not-quite-finished compositing with the live-action than the individual elements), while Jerry Goldsmith provides a ripping and funky score and there's a great payoff nod to the most famous movie monster of all in the film's final shot. It may have been a huge box-office flop (as Williams put it, "Unfortunately, it came out right on the heels of Titanic. Once you've seen one boat sink...") but it's not too surprising that it still convinced Universal that writer-director Stephen Sommers was the right person to revamp the Mummy franchise for the 90s.

Mill Creek's Blu-ray release offers a solid but not outstanding 2.35:1 widescreen transfer that's a definite upgrade on the previous DVD release, but sadly the soundtrack mix is the same problematic one from that earlier release - fine on the sound effects and score but much too low on the dialogue. The only extra is a trailer, which is hidden on the pop-up menu.

Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters may have beaten Jack Finney to the bookshops, but his original invading alien body snatcher story has had a much less distinguished screen career, being plagiarised as 1958's The Brain Eaters and inspiring episodes of Star Trek and The Outer Limits, but having to wait until 1994 for what turned out to be a very lacklustre legitimate adaptation. The screenplay ditches the post-nuclear war 21st century setting and the wholesale nudity but simultaneously manages to follow the novel's storyline fairly closely while missing the point, which is what tends to happen after years in development by nine writers working on two completely different storylines to see which one the studio liked and two directors who wanted to make a completely different film to the one the studio greenlit get thrown into the mix. The end result manages to be silly but not really that funny even in a bad movie way and rather rushed yet at the same time flat and static courtesy of Stuart Orme's lifeless direction (Orme has form when it comes to botching classic fantasies: his bowdlerised version of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is even worse).

To be fair, the idea hasn't dated well, with parasitic alien slugs attaching themselves to the backs of humans so they can go about their conquest of the Earth undetected. Of course, exobiologist Julie Warner knows something is wrong because the locals aren't checking her out or looking down her blouse, which might have played better had a more pneumatic actress been cast in the role. It doesn't help that she gives a terrible performance either, but it's the kind of film where the supporting cast either decide to have fun with it (Will Patton's eager-beaver scientist) or just seem to lose the will to live (Richard Belzer). It's not as if they have much to work with, the film's sole novelty being how quickly the government uncovers the invasion before finding out they're almost powerless to stop it. Some scenes hint at what could have been - an interview with a creature-controlled agent, a contaminated laboratory monkey communicating with the scientists, the notion of the aliens studying the humans who are studying them and using children against soldiers - but the execution is so utterly mundane that you just hope for some unintentional laughs to liven things up. Sadly they're in short supply: LifeForce it ain't, though at least the helicopter scene allows Donald Sutherland a bit of fun with his direlogue.

The film doesn't help itself by inviting comparisons to the much better sci-fi and creature features many of the cast have made, from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Sutherland) and The Thing (Keith David) to Total Recall (Marshall Bell, Quato himself) and Alien (Yaphet Kotto, who seems to have what looks like a dyed black sponge on his head). But then with leads as bland as Eric Thal - who expresses varying degrees of emotion by how widely he opens his mouth - and Julie Warner, playing guess-which-better-scifi-films-the-supporting-cast-have-been-in is a lot more fun than watching the cardboard cutout hero and heroine go through their paces en route to an incredibly soft and anticlimactic tell-don't-show ending. There's plenty of flatly staged action, but like much of the film it's all delivered in TV movie fashion without a hint of suspense or atmosphere or even much violence: this is perhaps the tamest film to ever be given an R rating. Cheap but not very cheerful, it gets a solid but uninspired 2.35:1 widescreen transfer with no extras.