Plot
A group of heavily armed hijackers board a luxury ocean liner in the South Pacific Ocean to loot it, only to do battle with a series of large-sized, tentacled, man-eating sea creatures who have taken over the ship first.

Release Year: 1998

Rating: 5.7/10 (15,424 voted)

Director: Stephen Sommers

Stars: Treat Williams, Famke Janssen, Anthony Heald

Storyline
A gang of jewel thieves board an empty luxury liner in the South Seas to find that the crew and passengers have been killed by a monster that kills its victims and sucks the water from their bodies that looks like a mix of a giant squid and the monster from "Aliens".

Cast:
Treat Williams - John Finnegan
Famke Janssen - Trillian St. James
Anthony Heald - Simon Canton
Kevin J. O'Connor - Joey Pantucci
Wes Studi - Hanover
Derrick O'Connor - Captain Atherton
Jason Flemyng - Mulligan
Cliff Curtis - Mamooli
Clifton Powell - Mason
Trevor Goddard - T. Ray
Djimon Hounsou - Vivo
Una Damon - Leila
Clint Curtis - Billy
Warren Takeuchi - Radar Man (as Warren T. Takeuchi)
Linden Banks - Communications Officer

Taglines: Women and children first. You're next.

Release Date: 30 January 1998

Filming Locations: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Box Office Details

Budget: $45,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend: $4,737,793 (USA) (1 February 1998) (1758 Screens)

Gross: $11,203,026 (USA)

Runtime: 106 min  | Germany: 97 min

Trivia:
Claire Forlani was cast as Trillian St. James. She even started shooting, but walked out after just three days, due to creative differences with director Stephen Sommers. The part subsequently went to Famke Janssen.

Goofs:
Revealing mistakes: When the creatures first strike the boat, and the passengers are running scared, the young Asian woman locks herself in the bathroom. When the creature is sneaking up on her through the toilet that she is sitting on, she frantically grabs the sink faucet. When she first grabs hold of it, you can already see it moving before she pulls it off its hinges.

Quotes:
Finnegan: [First lines] How we doin' out there, Leila?
Leila: Fuck you! How you doing, my ass! I'm totally soaked out here.
Finnegan: Aw, come on now, I pay you two bucks a day, don't I?
Leila: Get off your lazy ass and come and help me!
Finnegan: Cut me some slack, will ya? I'm workin' hard too, you know.
[Plays card games on his radar computer]

It's officially the best film ever made.

Rating: 10/10

Deep Rising is one of the best films ever made, if not the best! That's right, I'm making a bold statement but it's true. Clearly many of you here will disagree, but when you've seen the evidence that I put forward I don't think you'll be able to argue:

1) The Godfather: The Godfather was less believable than Deep Rising and also lacked such things as multi barrelled assault rifles, jet skis and huge torpedoes. Deep rising however, did not.

2) Raging Bull: No half-digested/half alive bodies, no engine room full of bloody bones or cool looking harpoon guns. Deep Rising had all these things.

3) Citizen Kane: A worthy try, but in the end Orson Welles decision to omit massive underwater squid monsters, left this film floundering. Deep Rising came up trumps in this department.

4) Casablanca: Fails to deliver on every account. Most notably, no one gets pulled down a toilet. Again, Deep Rising excels.

The sad thing is that if the Colour Purple had included a raid on a sinking cruise liner, infested with sub aqua monsters as part of the film, then it too would have climbed to the top of my favourite movie list. But as with most films the director took the easy way out and chose to ignore this very overlooked area of filmmaking.

In my aquatic monster/cruise liner catastrophe marking system, Deep Rising gets a colossal 4 shrimps. But the rather lacking Godfather, gets only 3 angelfish and a haddock.

Comments: