The Film: Leviatahan
The Principles: Peter Weller, Richard Crenna, Amanda Pays, Daniel Stern, Ernie Hudson
The Premise: A massive craft, futuristic, isolated and sterile, is filled with a rag-tag group of blue-collar workers. A multinational corporation funds their mission. Just days before they are due to go home, the crew discovers a sinister (perhaps even otherworldly) presence on their craft. Gore happens. Crew members are whittled down. The company does everything it can to screw over our heroes. Peter Weller does heroic stuff and manages to outsmart the company and the monster. Then he punches a woman full on in the face to close out the final shots. I kid you not. [Does the premise feel familiar at all, minus the woman punching?]
Is It Good?: Tough call, but ultimately no, this is not a good film. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t kind of love every minute of it. Because I did. It is just that Leviathan is aggressively aping better science fiction and horror films that came before it. And when I say aggressively I mean, just read the premise above!
The set up is so fundamentally identical to the set up of Alien that I genuinely wonder if lawsuits ever happened. However, once act two kicks in, Leviathan begins to become John Carpenter’s The Thing. Which, now that I think about it, doesn’t have all that different of a set up than Alien either!
By act three, when Macready Peter Weller, picks up his flame thrower to hunt down the freakish and twisted aquatic abomination that has formed from the melded-together bodies of his friends, I had pretty much settled in to Leviathan being a low rent Alien/The Thing knockoff that I was highly enjoying. BUT, the movie veers dramatically into Jaws territory with its final action set piece. Peter Weller might as well have shouted “Smile you son of a bitch” while delivering the death blow to our film’s water monster.
So, while Leviathan is an unabashed cash-in on better films that came before it, there is a certain joy that comes from seeing a movie like Leviathan here in 2012. The model work, production design, and practical creature effects are things of beauty (mostly) that just aren’t done in a mid to low budget film these days.
Is It Worth A Look?: No question, this is a fun blast of 1980s cheese that will provide more grins than groans. George P. Cosmatos had a pretty awesome run as a director in the 1980s, with Rambo II, Cobra, Leviathan, and Tombstone all under his direction, and in that chronological order no less! And apparently Stan Winston and his workshop generated the look of the monster for the film and the dive suits as well. Plus, look at that cast! Isn’t it awesome to realize that there was a time and place when Peter Weller, Richard Crenna, and Daniel Stern could headline a film? I love it. So there is some fabulous 1980s pedigree that is injected into Leviathan which should not be ignored just because the movie is derivative as hell.
Random Anecdote: The female lead in Leviathan looked and sounded so blasted familiar that I found myself aggravated and had to figure out where I knew her from. My brain came through before I needed to resort to IMDB and that’s right folks, Amanda Pays (who plays Elizabeth “Willie” Williams in Leviathan) was none other than the lead actress in the early ‘90s TV series The Flash!
Cinematic Soulmates: The aforementioned Alien, The Thing, and Jaws, any of the three of which Leviathan isn’t even a hair on the ass of.
18 comments
Not to mention all the Abyssing and Deep Star Sixing that was going on at the time.
Thanks, robotpals. As I was reading this article, I remembered there was another low-budget under-the-sea alien movie that came out the same year as LEVIATHAN, but I couldn’t recall the title. DEEP STAR SIX will forever be the superior film, as it stars the mighty Greg Evigan of BJ & THE BEAR and MY TWO DADS fame!
I’ve always been curious to see Deep Star Six, but either haven’t ever seen it, or have completely forgotten it.
This movie showed off Amanda Pays beautiful form.
I LOVE this movie. Whether it be the wicked Ron Cobb set designs, Hector Elizondo fixing machines with gum (“job security”) or:
MEG FOSTER: Why, you must’ve gone through hell.
ENRIE HUDSON: Gone? Bitch, we STILL HERE!
That one never gets old.
WEIRD. I watched this just LAST night for the first time since I was little. And I swear I shouted like 75-80 percent of this article at my girlfriend as we were watching it. Uncanny.
As you pointed out, everything pretty much unravels in the final couple of minutes..but is it just me or does that include the creature designs too?! Jesus. The final form or whatever is an abomination, and not in a cool way. Doesn’t seem like anything Stan Winston would come up with…even his Humanoids days were better. Maybe. I haven’t seen that one in a long time either.
Anyone it totally seems like they got someone entirely different to come in on that final creature design. Matter of fact the entire last couple of minutes…all the above-surface stuff…feels like an entirely different reshoot. Cosmatos’ films did that a lot.
Anyway*
Ernie Hudson FTW
Also I love Peter Weller’s little like fade away jumper pose at the end when he throws the dynamite at the Leviathan. So funny.
Speaking of how awesome Ernie Hudson is, and how bad the last few minutes of Leviathan are…um… yeah.
I had a screen grab of that exact pose, but went with the shouting “Brody face” still instead.
I. Love. This. Movie.
The highlight of this film when I saw it in the theater was a male member of a certain ethnic group yelling out, when skin-tight belegginged Amanda Pays was jogging down a hallway, “Man, she got a FAT pussy!”
On second thought, the highlight of this film, for me, was Amanda Pays’ fat pussy.
I remember this. I liked it way back then, but I haven’t seen it since. But I remember at the time there was all sorts of these underwater fetish flicks. Even Roger Corman got in on it with Lords of the Deep and the only real reason I wanted to see that was because Priscilla Barnes was in it. I think even Michael Crichton released a novel at the time that had a lot of underwater monster movie conventions. I also remember at the time low-budget cyborg movies were popular after RoboCop hit it big. R.O.T.O.R. with its Mad Max-esque poster comes to mind.
Damn it!! I was thinking about trading my dvd of this in for store credit at MovieStop, and now your article has made me think of rewatching it, even though I had the same reaction of this basically not being a good movie, but still having a cheese factor. You win. Flawless Victory!!!
That was Sphere, made much later into a movie best remembered for having Queen Latifah get eaten by jellyfish. The novel, if nothing else, brought up the semi-interesting concept of UFOs actually being piloted by humans from the future, which is about as likely as any other scenario posited.
See, that was the thing about the novel. It had interesting theories when they were trying to figure it all out, but when you got back to the meat of the story, it wasn’t all that interesting especially when the characters were utter cliches. I think that’s what frustrated me most about Crichton at the time. He was good a delaying information to keep you on the hook and then when you hit the reveal, it was a bit underwhelming.
Just think about the fact that, upon trade in, this film probably wouldn’t net you a dollar. But on your shelf, it can suck you in with its seductive, knock-off-y goodness anytime it strikes your fancy!
Comments are shown as archived from the original site; new comments are closed.