• Directed by Mary Ann Fisher
• Written by Howard R. Cohen
• Starring
  • Prisilla Barnes
  • Stephen Davies
  • Bradford Dillman
  • Roger Corman
• Produced by Roger Corman

Sometimes there are movies made that are just… well, bland. Not bad enough for you to stare drop-jawed at the television and mutter, “Who actually thought this was a good idea?” Rather, with these movies you yawn, cock your head at the screen, and mutter, “How did this ever get finished without the entire cast and crew slipping into a trance?”

Yes, Lords of the Deep is one of those movies.

Unlike other of the “undersea menace” movies of the late ’80s, this one doesn’t rip off Alien and transplant it to water (like Leviathan or Deep Star Six); instead, Lords of the Deep is Roger Corman’s attempt to ride the wake of The Abyss (in much the same way that Carnosaur was supposed to ride on Jurassic Park’s coattails).

Here’s what we’ve got:

In the year 2020, we’ve succeeded in blowing off the ozone layer, and the last habitable area of earth is under water. (Which is odd, because it still seems simpler to me to live on the surface, even wearing protective suits outdoors, than to inhabit pressurized habitats on the ocean floor. But that’s just me.) Employees of the Martel corporation have been at an undersea base, doing, you know, stuff. There’s an undersea architect, and a scientist, and a medical something-or-other, and an ostentatious commander, and some cannon fodder.

Scientist chick Claire (played by Priscilla Barnes of Three’s Company and enough other things to be ashamed of an incredibly overwrought performance) discovers some odd living substance, something that looks like a combination of wet paper towels and cream of wheat. For no reason I could discern, she sticks her hand in it and is rewarded with a brief psychedelic experience.

Meanwhile, the Martel corporation (represented on the viewscreen by Roger Corman himself, looking very mean without his characteristic canary-eating grin) has ordered a new crew to the base; the old one is to be “replaced” and “relieved.”

Unfortunately, when the replacement crew’s sub is almost there, there’s an earthquake, and… something. The base commander, Dobler, who speaks so ostentatiously that you just know he’s going to go postal by the end of the movie, sends one crewman in a mini-sub to check on the replacements, and another out in simple SCUBA gear (!) to repair some power lines damaged in the quake.

Oh yeah, and we establish that Claire in involved with Jack the architect with some exceedingly lame, supposedly “sweet” dialog. Just so you know.

Well, the hatches are blown on the replacement sub, and there’s no sign of the crew. But that’s not as bad as what greets the diver — despite the fact that he’s miraculously spared being crushed to jelly by deep-sea pressure (he went out in SCUBA gear, remember?), when he’s brought back on board — his suit is full of the cream-of-wheat stuff! He’s not to be found!

(Favorite dumb scene: Claire tries to demonstrate that the stuff in the suit is the same stuff she’s been studying. She accomplishes this by showing two different microscope slides to people. Not under the microscope; she just flashes them. “Oh good, Claire — I couldn’t tell when I saw it in mountainous quantities, but now that you’ve wiped an imperceptible dab on glass slides, the similarities between the two samples just jump out at me.”)

They put the poor diver’s body in a tank and watch as it mutates further (instead of, say, flushing it down the toilet). Commander Dobler is spooked, and wants to evacuate, but the only way out is by the shuttle that the replacements were coming in. (Apparently, despite the fact that they’ve been getting earthquakes recently, the Martel corporation doesn’t care enough about their employees to actually provide an escape route or anything.)

The cream of wheat, by the way, mutates completely into a giant manta ray with red glowing eyes. Cool, huh? And there’s another earthquake (or most likely an aftershock).

Now Dobler sends the crewman out in a mini-sub again (come to think of it, we’ve established that we have three mini-subs that can each seat two, and six crewmembers — and we’ve already demonstrated that water pressure doesn’t really do anything — couldn’t we just evacuate that way?), and a group of the manta rays get him. Bye-bye.

Dobler then tries to get the survivors to sign Martel’s non-disclosure statements — you know, as if a huge evil multi-national corporation wouldn’t have thought of that before sending the crew down into a state-of-the-art installation full of proprietary inventions and information. Claire leads the revolt against that, shrieking about how the public has a right to know. (”Are red-eyed mantas invading our seas? Film at eleven!”)

The creature in the tank busts out, and apparently it can move in air, because the computer says it’s vanished into either the air ducts or the water system, where, naturally, the computer has no sensors. (By the way, state-of-the-art for Martel corporation apparently means recycling an old Star Trek computer, complete with meaningless flashing lights and a harsh female voice that pauses between words.)

Now we get a bit of Alien thrown into the mix, as the crew splits up into twos to track the creature, with Dobler back in the control room. Then everyone finds a reason to split up further, because that always works, right? But NO! Dobler is actually trying to kill them — he splits them off into isolated rooms, then has the computer lock the door and suck out all the oxygen, then blames it on the creature.

Claire meets up with the creature again, and gets another psychedelic-telepathic experience, telling her to steal a shuttle and go to the creatures’ colony on the ocean floor. When she tells boyfriend Jack, he has no problem with this, and apparently it’s real easy to sneak away in a mini-sub, because she does.

Once there, she meets the guy who had apparently turned into cream of wheat; a creature had taken his place in order to get inside the installation to communicate. Oh and by the way, the creatures are aliens, and they once destroyed their own earthlike world, and they’re now here to prevent us from doing the same, and to teach us to live in harmony with the earth, and [truckload of New Agey crap deleted]. Oh yeah, and there’s also a big earthquake coming, a 10, and it’s right under the installation (once again, we see the foresight of the Martel corporation coming through).

I’m getting bored here, so I’ll cut it short: Claire goes back in the mini-sub to rescue everyone from the earthquake, but Dobler is operating under orders from Martel that assume the aliens to be hostile, and he’s going to be fired, so he goes postal and tries to kill everyone, and only Jack and Claire escape, and then we get some more New Agey enviro-fuzzies, the end.

As I said, this was Corman’s attempt to re-make or rip off or homage (or whatever) The Abyss. Unfortunately, it’s hampered by Starlost sets and costumes, a pointless script, thoroughly unremarkable acting, and more logical flaws than a Republican National Convention. Not bad enough to be breathtaking, but certainly bad enough to be skippable.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 2
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 1 (plus 5 psychedelic episodes)
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Stephen Davies was a tactical officer on the DS9 pilot, an alien on a later DS9 episode, and another alien on Voyager