Leviathan (1989)

Part of a trio of movies, along with Deep Star Six and The Abyss, that all came out in 1989, and all dealt somehow with aliens of one variety or another and deep sea mining. Leviathan is particularly interesting because of how blatantly it happens to rip off Alien, from the flamethrowers, to the shady, lying corporation that wanted the deep sea miners to find the Russian sub and the genetic material it contains. It also contains, like Alien, a lot of talk about the union the deep sea miners belong to and benefits and overtime pay-seriously its hashed out just like Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Anderson were down there, but this time its Ernie Hudson, Daniel Stern, and Hector Elizondo. Although, the twist is a bit different, like I mentioned (21 year old spoilers ahead) this time they are miners that come upon an old Russian sub that happens to contain some material from old genetic experiments. The twist being that it mutates the crew into a monster, instead of unleashing a monster itself. Oh, but thats where they start ripping off The Thing (see picture above.) Funny because you never get a good shot of the creature, there's like these snippets and what not but thats about it. (Or all they could afford.) Oddly enough, the greatest amount of tension was the very end, where they had to escape the exploding wreckage, they were clad in these deep sea diving suits and going to the surface, getting to the surface generated the most tension. Go figure.

The only real reason I ended up watching it is because for some reason this movie has come up a couple random times this week. First on a podcast. And then it was on TV, out of nowhere. It also reminded me of growing up, on Sundays, WPIX-11 used to show movies on Sunday afternoons, and during the school year you could probably catching the double (sometime triple) feature. I've never seen this uncut (obviously its not something I'd really seek out). This was one of the movies that would end up on there from time to time.

I wonder what happened to Peter Weller?