Leviathan (1989)

I owned Leviathan (1989) on VHS back when I was a kid. I didn't yet know who Peter Weller, Daniel Stern, Ernie Hudson, Richard Crenna, or any of the rest of the cast were ... but I knew I liked it. Also, I was nine years old and a fool. 

So let's be honest here - this is a pretty trashy aquatic horror film. For reference, see The Abyss; Death Ship; "The Raft" segment of Creepshow 2; Dead Calm; Jaws; and especially Deepstar Six, which was the same era and sucked even worse. Despite the ridiculous cast, who knows how they all got signed up for this, this movie really doesn't work on ANY level.

The movie begins deep underwater at a mining station, looking for "silver and other rare metals." Yeah, OK. You and everyone else. Then one of the workers, in a giant mech suit, starts hyperventilating wildly - to the point that a little red skull-and-bones light starts flashing on his control panel. That's NEVER good. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the team - mostly post-Robocop Peter Weller - try to get him back into the station while over-the-top dramatic music plays (featuring a xylophone!). So, tension from the word go. 

This movie wants, desperately, to be Alien. The scene where they are all eating around a table is cribbed directly from Alien. Even the character types are similar. Poor Daniel Stern is terribly wasted here. We have the sober leader, the loose cannon, the comedian, the paranoid-for-no-reason, the sexy girl, the doctor, the black guy, etc. Lather, rinse, repeat. 

The effects in this movie are ... bad. I'm sorry, Stan Winston, effects master of so many movies. They are piss poor. The spider that pops out in a cheap surprise near the beginning is approximately 1/10000th the quality of the Alien face-hugger it is obviously copied from. Even as a little kid, I knew these effects were trash garbage. I could have made better with a stop-motion camera and lint from my shag carpet. 

The basic plot, if you can call it that, is that this team of sub-marine miners encounter a terrible monster while trapped under the sea. This is somehow totally different than encountering a terrible monster while trapped deep in space, if you're continuing the analogies to Alien. Which was also about miners, by the way. Except all the characters acted like real human beings with realistic emotions, and the monster was damned horrifying. 

This movie, sadly, is like making a copy of something that has already been xeroxed about ten times. Every element that worked in Alien doesn't work here. The characters are thin and aren't given good dialog to speak. The computer effects somehow look infinitely less futuristic than Alien's decade-earlier depiction. The monster is half-assed at best. The tension is uneven. The music is too omnipresent and too serious. And, worst of all, the actors are all misused. Alien took unknowns and made them amazing. This movie takes established good actors and trashes them. 

Leviathan was directed by George P. Cosmatos, whose '80s movies include Of Unknown Origin, Rambo First Blood Part II (YESSSSSS), Cobra (YESSSSSSSSSSSSS), and this dreck. Then he made Tombstone in 1993, which is probably underrated and has great acting and great dialog, so go figure. 

His movies, until Tombstone, have a definite commonality - an emphasis on cheap action with tons of shooting and explosions, dialog that seems generally uncomfortable with the English language (like Cobra's "You're the disease... I'm the cure" or however that awkward one-liner goes), paper thin character types, and big bombastic scores that push the emotion the film is unable to provide. 

The movie was written by David Webb Peebles, who wrote very good scripts for Blade Runner, 12 Monkeys, and Unforgiven - the first and last being undisputed masterpieces. How on EARTH did he write this thing? Did someone massacre it after he was done? Did someone drop the script on the floor and pick up the pages in the wrong order? Did he go into a fugue state? Did someone impersonate him? Was he badly in debt to the Mob? What happened?!?!?!

 The film grossed $15,000,000 (how???), but I couldn't find any data on what it cost to make. Maybe it made money, maybe it broke even, maybe it lost. It's anyone's guess. Please avoid this.