Leviathan

THE STORY: Peter Weller  the Robocop guy, is Beck, the man in charge of an undersea mining base. One of his crew, a goofball named 6-pack, finds a sunken russian vessel, "Leviathan" and recovers some artifacts from it, including a flask of vodka. Beck confiscates the vodka but 6-pack and Bo, one of the female miners sneak some away and get drunk. The next day they both become ill. Doc Brown, the installation's medical officer discovers that they are mutating into some kind of amphibious lifeforms and warns Beck. 6-pack and Bo die while mutating or at least appear to be dead. Doc and Beck decide to flush the bodies out into the sea so the others won't be alarmed but the two dead bodies merge and go on the rampage. Beck calls on his boss via radio, played by the beautiful, but creepy sometimes Meg Foster. Meg bull[unwrite]s the crew telling them they can't be picked up because of a hurricane on the surface. Doc decides that the mutating horror is too dangerous to expose to anyone else so he wrecks the pods that will allow the crew to decompress and return to the surface. One by one the crew is murdered and absorbed into the monster until only Beck, Amanda Pays (The hot british chick from "The flash" and "Max Headroom" and Ernie Hudson "Ghostbusters"). They devise a way to decomperess and get to the surface escaping the monster! Just when all seems well and the survivors are floating on a calm sea awaiting rescue the monster surfaces and kills ernie Hudson...because he's the black guy and the black characters never survive in monster pictures. Beck shoots the creature with a flare gun destroying it. Then he punches Meg Foster in the face.

BEST LINE: "Been through? Bitch, we're still here!"-Ernie Hudson to Meg Foster's assertion that they must have been through hell.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?:

1) Ok, this is a high tech mining operation on the ocean floor, right? With five miners? I mean, a facility like this must be expensive and hard to build, but only six miners? Does this seem right?

2.) Amanda Pays character says she's in training for the astronaut program. Well, how do you go from an undersea miner to an astronaut? Just a question.

3.) I hate beat a dead horse, but come the [unwrite] on! Ernie Hudson makes it all the way to the last two minutes of the movie! When I first saw this movie with a group of friends all of us...black and white said "Wow! The brother lived!" Then the monster showed up and ate him. What a rip. The director could have dared to be different and let Ernie live. Its not like there was going to be a sequel.

4.) I'm not real clear on why 'the company' wasn't keen on saving Beck and crew. Of what possible benefit could it be to let the crew die? Stocks? It doesn't seem right. Wouldn't it be less of a blow to the company's image to save the miners from a mutant monster than to let it kill them and make up a fake hurricane story? (Especially when any jerk woth an internet connection can check the weather records for that area and see there was no hurricane! Or can the company fake NAVAL weather records, too?)

NUDITY AND SEX: No sex, but theres a scene with Amanda Pays in her undies taking a shower...which was only put in there as eye candy. Yes, she's upset that her friends have died and she's crying and washing the sadness off of her...but that scene was really pointless. Amanda Pays is a beautiful woman, and obviously she either refused to or wasn't paid enough to do that scene nude...so they threw it in anyway I guess in order to give guys something to oogle...which kinda took away from any impact it may have had. My guess is that Miss Pays was trying to wash the slimy idea off of her.

HUH?: The survivors make it to the surface rather easily. I know they thought there was a hurricane, but it seems they could have escaped long before they had to fight the monster. Beck doesn't seem like he trusts Meg Foster too much during their last radio discussion, and hell, its kind of obvious that she's lying anyway.

THE TALLY: This movie is typical goofy movie monster stuff. I kind of like it however. Between the other undersea movies that debuted the same time this one did (Deep Star 6 and The Abyss) this one was the best. Peter Weller is usually good in Sci-fi movies and Amanda Pays is talented but underused and underrated. Good cheese!