Dom's B-Movie Round-Up #15

So you think you've seen every low-budget underwater sci-fi/horror film from the late 80's, huh? You've seen "Leviathan." You've seen "Deepstar Six." You MIGHT have seen "Lords of the Deep." Chances are, you haven't seen "Endless Descent." No one has. This is a by-the-numbers ectype of "The Abyss," only instead of an epic exercise in chilling subtlety, what we have here is a bustling monster mash. To my surprise, this flick wasn't so bad. I had to force the matter-of-course storyline down my throat, though (my mother hid it in a piece of cheese). An experienced submarine crew heads for the ocean floor in the hopes of locating a lost submarine. There's the obligatory distress signal, the obligatory expert that everyone ignores, and the obligatory giant starfish.

R. Lee Ermey stars as a hardass captain who makes enemies with his "drill sergeant" attitude. Imagine that! Jack Scalia stars as the muscular sub designer who saves the day (and the girl). Ray Wise stars as the capricious toady who ends up backstabbing his shipmates. I don't know why I'm using big words to describe this movie. It's a straight-to-video creature feature that delivers cartoonish gore and a wide variety of naval fiends. The special effects are relatively sleek. The producers allocated their budget to all of the right places. Most of the marine mutants look nifty. The aforementioned starfish comes out of nowhere, and it almost belongs in a better film. Almost.

Zeram

When most people think "Japanese horror," they think "big monsters trampling city underfoot." Either that or "schoolgirls being raped by razor tentacles." 1991's "Zeram" is a unique item that falls into its own category. A violent robot escapes from its native planet and lands on (you guessed it) Earth. A bounty hunter follows the creature here, and sets out to destroy it with the aid of an artificially intelligent computer. The plot reminded me of "Critters," but the intergalactic bounty hunters in "Critters" aren't hot Asian chicks (only God knows why). A couple of blundering electricians are trapped in an alternate reality with our bounty hunter. They were sent there...um, somehow.

The specifics of "Zeram" are rather confusing. The film never stops to explain itself. It communicates violence, cool weapons, and slapstick humor pretty well, but those are the only things I understood. The goofball comedy falls flat, and the blundering electricians are not funny in the slightest. I applaud "Zeram" for striving to coadjute multiple genres, but it just doesn't work. I was hoping that the fleet action sequences would hold this sci-fi nonesuch together. The laser play is invigorating, but the pacing is lethargic. "Zeram" felt 150 minutes long. It only runs for 92 minutes, which means that I missed out on 92 minutes of sleep. It's not THAT bad. Truthfully, it's suited for anime geeks, and an anime geek I am not.