Despite a very solid cast and some fairly good production values, DeepStar Six sinks under the weight of it own inertia. This is an extremely uneventful film, and though ostensibly a monster movie there is almost no monster action whatsoever until the final twenty minutes or so, and even then what we get is extremely lackluster thanks to some very poor special effects. The script presumably aims to build tension gradually and spends a lot of time focusing on the ensemble cast (with a little extra emphasis on our heroine, played by Nancy Everhard), but while this may sound like a good idea in theory, in practice it fails utterly, as even a character-driven story needs a certain amount of drama and tension, which DeepStar Six totally lacks. As a result, I zoned out at numerous points in the tedious plot line and found myself strongly considering the stop button more than once...but I persevered in the vain hope that at some point a monster would rear itself from the mysterious depths and serious havoc would ensue. Never happened, as even when the sea monster that is our villain finally awkwardly asserts itself, the resultant action is poorly executed and the creature effects are inferior to similar designs from the 1950s. Some quality performances from a respectable cast that tries hard are unfortunately wasted, and while the aforementioned Everhard does a good job as our likable but underdeveloped heroine, the best performance probably comes from Miguel Ferrer as a burn-out victim whose sanity is slowly slipping away from him after six months of arduous underwater duty. It wouldn't have taken a whole lot for DeepStar Six to have been a solid b-movie, or maybe even a little more than that, if only the script and direction had made action a higher priority and perhaps developed a couple of the key characters a bit better. But as it stands, DeepStar Six is simply monotonous and underwhelming in the extreme.
Review of DeepStar Six
