Monday, January 29, 2018

Deep Blue Sea has a sequel that's only nineteen years late. Hey better late than never.

In 1999, a movie called Deep Blue Sea came out. To anyone that knows me, I've got a complicated relationship with shark movies. It kind of all started with Jaws, because my mother took me to a movie that was popular in the U.S.A., and being from Japan, she didn't understand that it was inappropriate for a six-year-old. For the record, it scared her too. However, it gave me nightmares for years. I still remember the fountain of blood erupting from Quint's mouth when he slid down the deck to the destroyed stern where the shark started to chomp him up. That was pure (early) Steven Spielberg horror right there, and it got me very interested in the creatures (to the point of kind of a macabre fascination with them).

For a while in my college years, I contemplated being a marine biologist just to study sharks. That never panned out. But I do go out of my way to see most shark movies at least once. To date, none have been as entertaining as Jaws, but Deep Blue Sea was close. It's subject matter, i.e., increasing the intelligence of sharks to create a cure for Alzheimer's disease, was brilliant. L.L. Cool J as the cook was awesome too, especially when he could shift from terror to say...lecturing on the proper way to make an omelet. And then there was (of course) the scene where Samuel L. Jackson got eaten that came out of the blue right after a powerful and heroic monologue. That was one of the first movies that really destroyed the idea that "you can't kill the hero" by stomping on it with all fins on deck (pun intended). I only later pieced together that Samuel L. Jackson actually does die in a lot of his films, so that's a kind of an expectation now. Maybe in the future I'll do a blog post that highlights Samuel L. Jackson's top 10 deaths from Jurassic Park to Deep Blue Sea to Revenge of the Sith. The man (seriously) knows how to do an onscreen death.

So Deep Blue Sea is getting a sequel, and it doesn't have any people from the original cast. But it does feature angry "supra-genius" sharks (maybe stealing a clicky thing from Jurassic World) who appear to be hungry for man-flesh (borrowing a term from The Lord of the Rings). I've embedded the trailer below for your enjoyment, so you too can watch and see how SyFy plans to spend its hard-earned money.

Assorted musings I have regarding this sequel:

1) Was it always a Deep Blue Sequel or did it just get re-branded post-production? It makes me wonder, you know. I mean, the trailer seems to feature the same underwater base and roughly the same story. So...is this just a situation where they filmed a movie about intellisharks and then were like...oh yeah...there's another movie just like this one! Let's just make this a sequel!

2) It's January 2018 and I know we all swore that we'd never see another bad movie, but we will. And this is direct to video...so you know its potential to be really bad is far worse than something that gets a major release. I know there's people out there reading my words, salivating at the line, "direct to video." You must join me in this pilgrimage.

4 comments:

  1. That's a long time to wait for a sequel, but not the longest.
    If it does suck, I'm sure RiffTrax will eventually have fun with it.

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  2. Sam Jackson getting eaten was the best part. No replicating that in a lame sequel. Since it's Syfy maybe they should cross it with Sharknado.

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  3. I loved Deep Blue Sea but mainly because the Samuel Jackson scene really set up the rest of the movie. I do struggle with other shark movies probably because of residual scarring as a child from seeing Jaws. While Jaws is possibly the best movie of all time, I think I can only appreciate it because I know exactly what is going to happen. I really hate 'shark shock'. That got reinforced a couple of weeks ago when I tried to watch 47 Meter Deep on Amazon Prime. I got 40 minutes in and had to turn it off. I could see where it was going and decided to read the wiki instead.

    Even if I weren't a child in man's clothing, there's no way I could watch Deep Blue Sea 2. If it doesn't have LL Cool J or Thomas Jane in it then it's not a proper sequel.

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  4. Apparently I, too, was taken to Jaws as a young child. But to the drive in, so I slept through it. Supposedly. (I have no memory of this.)

    I hope the film is as bad as you anticipate. I will pass.

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