Deep Blue Sea

(1999) ****

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I came here to work with a talent manager whose biggest client at that time was Stellan Skarsgard, who gets his arm chomped off just as things start to go horribly wrong in Deep Blue Sea. I remember that this manager and her assistant went to see the film and thought it was just okay (although they were totally psyched that Stellan, whose biggest film up to that point was Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, was making a huge American flick). So I never bothered with it. But I have to say, of the movies I have managed to stay awake for this Horrorthon, this one did pretty much everything it was supposed to do, and I have few complaints.

The problem all starts when some pesky scientists, fooling around and tampering with mother nature like they always want to do, even though it’s always a bad, bad idea, add some chemical or compound or something or whatever or whatnot to sharks’ brains. Huge mistake. The sharks get smarter and figure out a way to destroy the scientists’ entire underwater laboratory, flooding various parts of it in order to get inside and eat anyone they find. OK, so sharks get inside your place and eat you. That’s pretty scary, really.

The absolute best moment of this movie—and maybe any movie—happens when Samuel L. Jackson, in the role of a business man who is funding this whole enterprise and happens to visit on the bad day when the sharks take over, gives a stirring speech designed to get everybody’s head together, make them stop panicking, and rouse them to glorious, brave action. As the music swells and the other characters begin to buy in to Jackson’s rhetoric, a giant shark comes out of nowhere and eats him head first in about a second. Why can’t more useless monologues end like this? I would love to see the giant shark device used more often in all sorts of genres.