31 Nights of Halloween Horror - Night 9 - The Rift

The Rift

83 minutes

Dir. Juan Piquer Simon

1990/Spain

What do you get when you add Leviathan, The Abyss, Deepstar Six, Aliens, R. Lee Ermey, Ray Wise and the director of Pieces and Slugs?  An underwater sea monster movie that rips on a bunch of other films with plenty of cheesy effects.  Put on your scuba gear, tonight we are going 33,000 meters down to The Rift.

Like I said I am a sucker for sea monster movies, not sure how this one passed me by.  It came out in 1990, never made it to theatres and went straight to video under the title Endless Descent.  Either way I finally tracked it down under the title The Rift and just dove right in.

An experimental submarine the “Siren I” goes missing so “Siren II” goes out to look for it.  The Siren II is filled with your usual rag tag underwater crew as these movies generally are.  We call them victims.  Our victims are rounded out by Super feathered hair Jack Scalia, a young R. Lee Ermey, who you guessed it, plays are hard ass Navy captain who is running the sub and a young Ray Wise, you plays the type of characters Ray Wise usually plays.  The rest of the victims are filled with a smorgasbord of accents from all different people, but none of them matter because they are all going to die anyway.

Now that we have our body count total out of the way, we can get on with what there is of our story.  Siren II locates the black box of Siren I which is thousands of feet below.  They maneuver the sub via a Commodore 64 and graphics that make Atari’s 2600 Asteroids look complex.  You know how it goes from here, 33,000 meters down, oxygen is running low, where are we going to park the sub, diver goes out (even though I think the diving record in a special suit is like 2000ft.), but hey whatever.  So the diver goes out to find the black box but instead finds some kind of plant life which should not be growing with no sunlight so deep.  So he sends a sample back, but in the process gets attacked by some kind of tentacled thing?  I don’t know, hard to see what is happening and there is a lot of seaweed in the way, but it is our first glimpse that they are not alone down there.

Eventually we find out that the seaweed brought on board grows and in a sense attacks people turning them into a seaweed goo type of fungus stuff, meanwhile everyone else heads out into an underground cavern they located and discovers the government or corporation of whoever, was doing some genetic mutations or something and made all kinds of creatures.  Which luckily for us attack our cast and we get to see all kinds of practical effects monsters shoot out of holes in the cave walls and scurrying across the ground attacking people.  Blood and goo go flying.  We even get a giant stop motion egg laying flower monster thing.  This one does not disappoint in the creature department.

As long as you are not here for the story, you are good.  There is some build up we need to sit through, but ultimately we are here for the effects and as usual J.P. Simon does not disappoint.

Acting is a chore to sit through at times, luckily there are some veterans mixed in to make it easier to sit through, its short, and it’s no worse than Contamination.  So I am going to say if you are fan of underwater creature movies, you can probably do worse than this, though why would you want to?