Move over "Battlefield Earth." Heave to, "Waterworld." I think IMDb needs to make a sequel to its own list: Son of the Bottom 100! And the only movie on the list is "Deep Rescue." I generally love the sci-fi action/adventure. It's possible that my appreciation for the genre makes me more critical than I should be, but this is a giant, space shuttle-shaped turd floating in the toilet bowl of film as we know it.
The script seems to be a race to see how many clichés each character can jam in per shot. The acting/directing looks like they all flunked out of the William Shatner School of Dramatic Emphasis. The most shameful mess was how often the story ripped off other considerably more brilliant deep sea crisis flicks, particularly "The Abyss." It was such a flagrant steal that I expected pretty little water aliens to appear when the romantic leads get stuck in a collapsing DSRV. I imagine the creatures would be queued in right after the couple promises to survive for one another and hang on no matter what even though they fought non-stop for the first 100 minutes of the movie just like Bud and Lindsay. But with an obviously limited special effects budget, someone's nephew would have had to draw the little space angels on overhead transparency and wiggle them around behind a fish tank. Maybe they couldn't even afford a 4th grader, particularly if he was working for scale.
I won't say that "Deep Rescue" is as bad as the 2005 rehash of "Pride and Prejudice," because P&P was actually trying to be literary. But this pretty bloody terrible. I'd love to see MST3k revived just for this monstrosity.
