Blood "N" Bubbles

The History of Diving In the Movies.

Nobody said Blood 'N' Bubble movies had to make sense! As the above poster pictures shows, the climax of the movie is a man and woman making an emergency ascent from the depths of the ocean to the surface thanks to the power of a hi-tech escape lift bag. Never mind that the girl has come from a thousand feet down wearing just a thong and muscle shirt, or that the lift bag can pull the weight of a Jim Suit, this is Hollywood and science can't stand in the way of a good yarn. Can you name this 1989 movie which starred Peter Weller and Richard Crenna?

Answer

What the photo doesn't show is that the divers are heading to the surface full speed ahead because Leviathan, a really big monster is looking for his next meal! In the movie Leviathan people are digging silver at the bottom of the sea. There are eight diver/miners (two of them women) living in a pressurised, luxuriously large mining camp. The underwater habitat is filled with computers, dive equipment, escape pods, a hospital and much more. The feature film opens with the crew eagerly anticipating their shore leave, they have only three days to go before ending a three month stay on the bottom. The action really begins when a Jim suited diver finds a sunken Russian ship and recovers its safe. Inside it is a bottle of contaminated vodka. One of the crew drinks the hooch and is quickly metamorphosed into a scaly monster that looks like an underwater version of Little Shop of Horror's Audrey 2.

It is a Dino De Laurentis film (he brought us Conan the Barbarian and Flash Gordon) so there is a lot of graphic violence and the usual shark scene. However, there is something new, in Leviathan look for a deep water angler fish to give a few quick submerged thrills. Most of the dive scenes are rather generic and one can assume that the Jim Suit stuff was probably done in a studio.

RATING - Two Bubbles