Deep Rising

I like this film a lot. It’s the ultimate B-movie, but a lot of fun. My favourite part is when they flee from the unfolding tentacle. It’s a pity that they show the monster in full by the end, it isn’t too good. It’s very predictable (I don’t mind it in this case), but it did manage to surprise me once, at the end on the island. Brilliant! (17.11.2007)

Typical Sommers, i.e. B-movie entertainment from beginning to end, full of effects, jokes and exaggerations of all kinds, but not forgetting to be suspenseful. (22.08.2009)

Priceless bollocks. There are lots of holes in logic, the characters couldn’t be any more cookie-cutter and the entire concept around how and where the tentacled creature shows up makes absolutely no sense. But Deep Rising is a very entertaining action ride that in an attractive setting blends motifs of The Poseidon Adventure and classic monster B-movies to deliver plenty of attractions in elevator shafts, flooded corridors and machine rooms, knows how to combine bloody deaths and mystery with the grace and the constant wisecracks of Treat Williams, and has a brilliant final scene that is quite unique for the standards of the genre (it’s a shame they never made a sequel). And the sex appeal of Famke Janssen is a perfect visual contrast to the ugly octopus. I wonder why they no longer make stuff like this… (29.04.2019)

Stephen Sommers is a master of B-movies with silly dialogue and shoddy effects, and Deep Rising is a prime example of this, but unlike The Mummy or Van Helsing, the level of stupidity in Deep Rising is on a higher level. I understand that for many viewers, this cross between 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Poseidon is a guilty pleasure experience, but for me it was an incredibly stupid film with a bunch of mostly unlikeable characters that you couldn't possibly root for. Given the film's ending, on the one hand I'm perhaps glad there wasn't a sequel. (02.08.2020)