The Screen Addict | Deep Rising

I did a little Stephen Sommers re-appreciation over the weekend with a viewing of The Mummy films, and also by revisiting the underrated SciFi-Fantasy gem Deep Rising (1998).

I had forgotten what a delicious, unapologetic thrill-ride Sommers’s pre-Mummy monster extravaganza actually is. It’s Die Hard (1988) meets The Abyss (1989) meets Poseidon (2006), and somehow the writer-director makes it all fit together flawlessly.

Top-notch cast with my fellow countrywoman Famke Janssen as the solid standout, and Treat Williams’s character quite obviously a test run for Brendan Fraser’s inbound mummy-hunter Rick O’Connell.

The majority of the special effects conjured up by Hollywood’s King of Creatures Rob Bottin still hold up swimmingly almost 25 years later – something that certainly cannot be said of every movie from this era.

Made with Disney money, DR became Sommers’s calling card for big-budget spectacles and directly led to Universal Pictures teaming up with the director on The Mummy (1999), The Mummy Returns (2001) and Van Helsing (2004).

Additionally, DR marks the first official collaboration between Sommers and the immediately recognizable Kevin J. O’Connor, the actor who became somewhat of a lucky charm for the director and would go on to feature in almost all of Sommers’s films.

Although DR ends on an intriguing cliffhanger, a sequel was unfortunately never made. The film lost a ton of money stateside and wasn’t even released theatrically in the rest of the world.

Nevertheless – great stuff for lazy Sunday movie-marathon!

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Twitter (X): Robin Logjes | The Screen Addict