Deep Evil (2004)

What keeps Deep Evil just about afloat are the creepy first half-hour and the good creature design(The Creature from the Black Lagoon comparison is definitely apt). The acting is also competent, nobody is terrible but nobody apart from Lorenzo Lamas perhaps stands out either. Deep Evil however was the sort of movie that started off with promise but went in a downward spiral very quickly. There is nothing interesting about how it looks, how it's shot is dully lit with a use of bland colours. And most of the special effects are generically coloured and look as though they were constructed in a rush at last minute. The music doesn't drive the movie at all, in fact it is a very lifeless soundtrack and is just forgettable at the end of the day. The dialogue is very turgid stuff, full of tiresome clichés and full of lines that make you go "what do they mean by that?" How the actors managed to keep a straight face or not look embarrassed is quite an accomplishment. The story is often slow to the point of boredom, and is predictable and like Alien mixed with The Thing but with hardly any of the suspense, thrills or nail-biting horror. The deaths are generally weak, in number and how they're played, and the alien(s) are not threatening in the least and are developed and characterised very poorly. The science and the depiction of the military will raise eyebrows and even annoy/anger people. There is very little interesting about the characters and you don't care for a single one. To conclude, not bad to start with but from half-an-hour in it's very bad. 3/10 Bethany Cox

Deep Evil starts as Major Michael Ross (Adam Harrington) gets a call from his boss Colonel Harrison (Michael Kopsa) informing him to get his team ready for a top secret mission, a mission to a biochemical research laboratory just outside Alaska that has gone into lock-down because of some unknown breach, problem or terrorist attack. Joining the military team are scientist's Cole (Ona Grauer) & Lang (Jim Thorburn) who seem to know more than they are telling. Once there the team enter the facility & find some sort of slime covering everything, eventually they find one of the staff (Leah Cairns) but she is infected with some sort of disease & is killed. The team soon realise that they are trapped inside the facility with an alien creature that drips intelligent killer alien water(!) & to add to their worries the entire place is going to be nuked to stop it spreading outside...This Canadian production was directed by Pat Williams & as far as dumb unoriginal made-for-tell 'Creature Feature' type Aliens (1986) rip-offs go Deep Evil isn't as awful as some although that's not saying much & I would still have a hard time recommending it to anyone other than the most die-hard of sci-fi horror film junkies with a high tolerance level much like myself. The script is your standard Aliens rip-off with some team of soldiers going in blind to a situation where they find themselves up against some hostile alien threat in an isolated location where they find themselves stranded facing both the alien menace & impending extermination from some huge explosion that will destroy the entire place they are trapped in or on. Most of the clichés are here although the alien water is fairly new, however the makers just end up ripping James Cameron off again & using it like the liquid metal T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991). Things start off OK & hold your interest but then it descends into people walking around dark corridors not doing much which becomes boring very quickly. The character's are alright (even if they are ripped-off from Aliens with Lang as the evil Burke corporate character, there's a wise cracking Hudson type & the female scientist Cole is the strong woman Ripley impersonator), the plot is alright if a complete rip-off of James Cameron's greatest hits & it's watchable I suppose but fairly forgettable without much action or gore & it's nothing that hasn't been hundreds of times before.Surprisingly the CGI computer effects aren't too bad here, the liquid changing into alien spider's effects are actually fairly impressive for a low budget production such as this. There's not much gore here unfortunately, there's some melting skin, someone is shot through the head & there's some blood splatter but not much else. The aliens themselves are alright but forgettable, they are humanoid in shape & are obviously just actor's in rubber suits.Apparently shot in just 14 days on a fairly respectable $1,500,000 budget in the strangely named Chilliwack in British Columbia in Canada the production values are better than expected & it looks alright with decent enough special effects. The IMDb lists the dreaded Jim Wynorski as an executive producer & I would assume he had a hand off role as this turned out better than just about any film he ever directed.Deep Evil is your standard unoriginal Aliens rip-off made-for-telly 'Creature Feature' with better CGI & production values than I expected although in the end it's the boring & predictable script that kills it dead. Footage from the opening sequence was edited into the abysmal The Thing Below (2004) made the same year.

"Deep Evil" is a nicely decent creature feature.**SPOILERS**Hours after the detonation of a nuclear bomb, Trainor, (Lorenzo Lamas) and a military team, Maj. Michael Ross, (Adam Harrington) Sgt. Hall, (Will Sanderson) and Capt. O'Brien, (Rachel Hayworth) are sent in with Dr. Cole, (Ona Grauer) and Prof. Peter Langdon, (Jim Thorburn) to a chemicals weapons facility where they both work. Upon entering, they find the entire complex empty and covered in slime, as well as one of their experiments. When they find that the escaped experiment is a cloned alien species designed for the US Army, they race to get out before becoming infected by the creatures.The Good News: This wasn't all that bad of a creature feature. The opening half hour of the film is pretty creepy. There's a couple of really suspenseful set-ups, all stemming from the fact that it's almost impossible to see what is lurking in the shadows. There's constant hints around that there is something there in the place, but it's not known what. The lighting and damp location there play important parts in that fact. There's some really nice good moments driven from the early suspense scenes. The film really picks up back in the final twenty minutes which is filled with action and lots of excitement to close the film out on a high note. The chase through the missile room is the best part, keeping the gunfire going and the action going along. The creature looks really threatening, a kind of off-shoot of The Gillman, only with some adjustments done near the face to change it slightly. The film does have some rather decent science fiction to explain the proceedings, which can get overly complicated but are still noteworthy without being over-the-top. It's all quite decent.The Bad News: There's still a couple of things wrong in this one. The first is the pacing, especially in the beginning. Granted, there's some really creepy moments in there, but it's also quite slow, as the majority of the time remaining is devoted to the clichéd dialog choice of having characters constantly repeat that the mission is top-secret and won't reveal what's going on until too late. That not only is a tiresome cliché but really drags out the film when there's a fifth conversation that constantly features the same result with the same dialog. The monster itself is so rarely on-screen that, while it looks easily creepy, there's hardly any scares derived from it. The design is good enough, but it's not seen enough to really get the most out of it. The very low body-count also lowers the gore in here, and while we do get some gory kills, they aren't really on-screen that often. They are for the most part off-screen, with the weakest, non-goriest kill being shown. That is the most aggravating part about it, especially because the other deaths are really gruesome and the weakest one is on-screen. Otherwise, this isn't all that bad.The Final Verdict: Yes, there are some problems with it, but that isn't enough to really disregard it. It's certainly not one of the better films of this type around, as it's too clichéd to stand out, but it's still worthy of a look for those who are interested in this type of films.Rated R: Graphic Language, Violence and Nudity

As the number of insect thrillers produced by First Look Entertainment continue to rise (Mosquito Man, Larva), Deep Evil seems to be the most original.A meteorite crashes in Syberia back in the 1950's containing alien DNA, it quickly spreads through a top secret base and wipes everyone out before a nuke makes toast out of everything....or so we thought. Fastforward 50 years and the same virus that wiped out the last bio-station strikes again, but this time it wasn't contained. The entire movie is basically a flashback from one character's view point. Its tough to explain the rest of the movie so I'll make it short....black op, no survivors.The storyline itself was interesting until you were able to figure out the end before the climax even began. I really wanted to like this movie for it had a lot of suspicion. No kidding, this movie actually kept me on the edge of my seat for a while until I realized the ending like I said earlier. For those who have seen this movie, you know the exact scene I am referring to. This movie showed some promise and had some cool convulsing effects, plus I always love to see movies where the bad guys win. The only problem I had with this movie was there wasn't any nudity. Other than that it was a very underrated flick that most people gave a bad rating because they don't like movies that make you think 7 out of 10