The Thing Below starts aboard a US Naval ship called the Semenza which is transporting a top secret alien specimen to Maryland during a tropical storm which causes an accident & the alien organism to escape & cause a catastrophic explosion & sinking the Semenza. The top brass & the president back in Washington start crapping themselves as another alien specimen still remains on the Sea Ghosy, a top secret Government oil-rig that has been used for deep sea drilling in search of a new energy source. Sensing the potential danger a team of sailors come hard as nails mercenaries lead by Captain Jack Griffith (Billy Warlock) are dispatched to the oil-rig to assess the situation & clean up as necessary, joining them is scientist Anna Davis (Catherine Lough Haggquist) & slimy back stabbing Government man Dean Rieser (Peter Graham-Gaudreau). Once on the rig they find the alien creature loose & it has a taste for human flesh...
This straight to video piece of crap Canadian produced sci-fi horror film had the working title It Waits Below, was shown on cable TV as Sea Ghost, was bizarrely pitched as a sequel to Ghost Rig (2003) here in the UK & was retitled & released on DVD as Ghost Rig 2: The Legend of the Sea Ghost & was released on video in the US as The Thing Below which was executive produced under the name Noble Henry & directed by Jim Wynorski under one of his other many alternate names Jay Andrews & to be quite frank is utterly awful both conceptually & technically. The whole film feels so lame & just randomly cobbles together all sorts of plot points from other much better sci-fi horror films such as The Intruder Within (1981), The Thing (1982) & Aliens (1986) & is so bad that out of the three people it took to write this god-awful crap one went uncredited & the other two hide under pseudonym's like Wynorski did. There are so many plot holes it's just not funny, I mean this alien creature is known to emit radiation so strong that it could kill 100 men yet the greatest scientific minds the US Government can conjure up decide to put it in a glass tube so weak it breaks when dropped on the floor, why does this alien creature spend so much time & effort creating elaborate hallucination's for it's victims when it could quite easily just kill them straight away which it eventually does anyway, why can the creature seemingly change size & shape at will, why does the US Government insist on sending in a team that know nothing of what's going on, wouldn't it help if they did know at least a little bit about what was going on & what they might end up having to face? Also before I run out of space there's loads of clichés like the unearthed alien, a bunch of character's trapped with it on a remote location, Government cover-ups & conspiracies are thrown in here & the makers even have the nerve to set-up a sequel with an awful twist ending (that comes after the awful ending in which the alien takes human form, speaks perfect English & explains itself & it's origins to the survivors for some reason) that left me worried that one might actually emerge one day. The Thing Below is simply awful, it's overlong at over 90 minutes, the film suddenly switches genre from sci-fi monster film to low rent porn to cheap western to so bad it's laughable drama to an action war film set in Iraq(!) that destroys any sort of flow the film might have built up.
So the script, pacing, narrative, logic & flow of The Thing Below is awful but the pain doesn't stop there as besides conceptually The Thing Below is also technically abysmal too. For a start there are scenes from other films edited into The Thing Below, & badly edited too as they don't match the footage shot for the film itself anyway. The most recognisable footage is stolen from Virus (1999), not that it matches as the footage used is of the boat tugging a barge along which disappears between certain shots. Footage from Deep Evil (2004) is also badly edited into the film. Ther also seems to be lots of annoying stock footage of US army ships & helicopters taking off used as well. I suppose I should mention the CGI computer effects which are notable only because they are some of the worst ever committed to celluloid, they really are that awful. The alien has no discernible shape or size & the best I can figure out looks like a blob with tentacles. There's not much gore here, there's a shot of a tentacle going into someone's stomach & exiting through their mouth & someone is shot through the head & that's it. There's an impromptu strip scene which comes of nowhere.
The IMDb reckons this had a budget of about $1,500,000, well I don't believe that for a second as I just cannot see where that money would have went & since the CGI effects are amongst the worst I have ever seen & there's plenty of footage stolen from other sources edited in here I just don't see The Thing Below having anything like that sort of money spent on it. Filmed in British Columbie in Canada the production value are poor, it's not scary & did anyone else notice how Rieser just stands in exactly the same spot on that boat for the first fort odd minutes? The acting sucks & the fact ex-Baywatch (1989-2001) bloke Billy Warlock is the star says everything.
The Thing Below or under whatever title you see it is simply terrible, it's OK for a laugh or two but is that really worth sitting though one of the worst written sci-fi monster films ever made? I'd say no. Simple really, don't bother.
This straight to video piece of crap Canadian produced sci-fi horror film had the working title It Waits Below, was shown on cable TV as Sea Ghost, was bizarrely pitched as a sequel to Ghost Rig (2003) here in the UK & was retitled & released on DVD as Ghost Rig 2: The Legend of the Sea Ghost & was released on video in the US as The Thing Below which was executive produced under the name Noble Henry & directed by Jim Wynorski under one of his other many alternate names Jay Andrews & to be quite frank is utterly awful both conceptually & technically. The whole film feels so lame & just randomly cobbles together all sorts of plot points from other much better sci-fi horror films such as The Intruder Within (1981), The Thing (1982) & Aliens (1986) & is so bad that out of the three people it took to write this god-awful crap one went uncredited & the other two hide under pseudonym's like Wynorski did. There are so many plot holes it's just not funny, I mean this alien creature is known to emit radiation so strong that it could kill 100 men yet the greatest scientific minds the US Government can conjure up decide to put it in a glass tube so weak it breaks when dropped on the floor, why does this alien creature spend so much time & effort creating elaborate hallucination's for it's victims when it could quite easily just kill them straight away which it eventually does anyway, why can the creature seemingly change size & shape at will, why does the US Government insist on sending in a team that know nothing of what's going on, wouldn't it help if they did know at least a little bit about what was going on & what they might end up having to face? Also before I run out of space there's loads of clichés like the unearthed alien, a bunch of character's trapped with it on a remote location, Government cover-ups & conspiracies are thrown in here & the makers even have the nerve to set-up a sequel with an awful twist ending (that comes after the awful ending in which the alien takes human form, speaks perfect English & explains itself & it's origins to the survivors for some reason) that left me worried that one might actually emerge one day. The Thing Below is simply awful, it's overlong at over 90 minutes, the film suddenly switches genre from sci-fi monster film to low rent porn to cheap western to so bad it's laughable drama to an action war film set in Iraq(!) that destroys any sort of flow the film might have built up.
So the script, pacing, narrative, logic & flow of The Thing Below is awful but the pain doesn't stop there as besides conceptually The Thing Below is also technically abysmal too. For a start there are scenes from other films edited into The Thing Below, & badly edited too as they don't match the footage shot for the film itself anyway. The most recognisable footage is stolen from Virus (1999), not that it matches as the footage used is of the boat tugging a barge along which disappears between certain shots. Footage from Deep Evil (2004) is also badly edited into the film. Ther also seems to be lots of annoying stock footage of US army ships & helicopters taking off used as well. I suppose I should mention the CGI computer effects which are notable only because they are some of the worst ever committed to celluloid, they really are that awful. The alien has no discernible shape or size & the best I can figure out looks like a blob with tentacles. There's not much gore here, there's a shot of a tentacle going into someone's stomach & exiting through their mouth & someone is shot through the head & that's it. There's an impromptu strip scene which comes of nowhere.
The IMDb reckons this had a budget of about $1,500,000, well I don't believe that for a second as I just cannot see where that money would have went & since the CGI effects are amongst the worst I have ever seen & there's plenty of footage stolen from other sources edited in here I just don't see The Thing Below having anything like that sort of money spent on it. Filmed in British Columbie in Canada the production value are poor, it's not scary & did anyone else notice how Rieser just stands in exactly the same spot on that boat for the first fort odd minutes? The acting sucks & the fact ex-Baywatch (1989-2001) bloke Billy Warlock is the star says everything.
The Thing Below or under whatever title you see it is simply terrible, it's OK for a laugh or two but is that really worth sitting though one of the worst written sci-fi monster films ever made? I'd say no. Simple really, don't bother.