In short: Off Limits (1988)

Vietnam, 1968, during the Tet Offensive. CID Sergeant’s McGriff (Willem Dafoe) and Perkins (Gregory Hines) are the kind of racist, violent shitheels you’d expect in that role during this time. However, when the murder of a local prostitute leads them on the trail of a whole series of murders of prostitutes during the last year, all showing a lot of disturbing parallels, and their investigation begins to suggest the serial killer to be an American officer, they don’t back down but go out of their ways to catch him, risking life and career. Of course, they are still treating the Vietnamese as well as enlisted US soldiers like crap while they are doing it, and can’t spend five minutes without going on about how terrible a country they deem Vietnam to be, so it’s probably just another day at the office for these two.

At times, Christopher Crowe’s attempt to transfer 80s cop movie clichés to the more interesting background of the Vietnam War, actually does manage to make these clichés somewhat more interesting and lively; at other times, I couldn’t shake the feeling the director uses the background as an excuse to be more racist and have more unpleasant main characters than he could have gotten away with in a film set in the 80s. Crowe certainly knows how to stage a chase scene and other action movie core elements, giving them a grimy and dirty edge that fits the rest of a film whose Vietnam feels a lot like New York in action movies made at this time by people like James Glickenhaus.

The plot’s not terribly good at leading us from action scene to action scene, though. Crowe’s script never really manages to make the actual investigation terribly interesting – and honestly, if you don’t guess the whodunit very early on, I’d be very surprised. The thin characterisation of everyone involved here doesn’t make the plot any more interesting either. There’s a desperate attempt to humanise at least Dafoe’s character a little with a romance plot between him and a French novitiate sister played by the not terribly French (but lovely) Amanda Pays, but it’s so perfunctorily written, it doesn’t do much beyond adding scenes to the movie.


The characters are so bare-bones, even actors with as much heft as Dafoe, Hines or Fred Ward don’t manage to suggest much depth to these men; only house favourite Scott Glenn has an opportunity to actually do something of interest acting-wise, but he’s not in too many scenes.

In short: Leviathan (1989)

The crew (played by an ensemble consisting of Peter Weller, Amanda Pays, Richard Crenna, Ernie Hudson, Hector Elizondo, Michael Carmine, Lisa Eilbacher and Daniel Stern that isn't exactly challenged by the material) of an experimental deep sea mining project is looking forward to the end of their stay underwater in just three days; it's probably just early enough to keep people from kicking the shit out of each other.

Things take a turn for the unpleasant when the dumbest, most unpleasant and least long-lived of the crew stumbles upon a sunken Russian military vessel, the "Leviathan". Finding a ship and stealing its safe are one, of course. The safe doesn't contain much of value: there are the personal effects of quite a few dead Russians, a videotape speaking of some kind of plague on board, and a bottle of vodka. Personally, I'd abstain from drinking that particular stuff, even if I were into harder drinks, what with it coming from a plague ship and all, but then I'm not a character in a horror movie. It won't come as much of a surprise when the fittingly named Sixpack and his female buddy Bowman show fewer inhibitions toward suicide and soon come down with a lethal case of severe genetic mutations.

The dead crewmen don't stay dead, though, or rather, after some time their bodies transform into a single monster with too many mouths, tentacles and other fun appendages that then proceeds to go on a rampage. As if a deadly monster on board of a deep sea station weren't enough, the surviving crew members take their dear time before they decide to evacuate. Once they do, they learn why one shouldn't work for a company with Meg Foster in a leading position.

Leviathan is another film belonging to the small yet fun late 80s SF horror movie sub-genre that - probably trying to borrow some of the fire of James Cameron's Abyss (aka "be nice, or we'll kill you all, for we are space Americans") - puts either Alien or Aliens from space into the deep sea. While this isn't the height of creativity, I always do respect the willingness of certain producers to rip off more than one successful movie at once; it sure is more interesting than ripping off only one film.

In George Pan Cosmatos' (a director without a directorial personality if ever I saw one) Leviathan, the producers decided to borrow from the first Alien movie (and a bit of The Thing, too, for good measure), just without everything that could be read as feminist, and in general without much of that "subtext" stuff the eggheads are always talking about. That Cosmatos isn't as great at building a mood of dread even before the monsters appear as Ridley Scott was will come as no surprise. However, to be fair to the movie at hand, it's perfectly entertaining if you don't compare it with the film it's ripping off, and instead just roll with its ambition of being a decent monster flick taking place underwater.

Cosmatos is certainly competent competent enough when it comes to staging gory (and pleasantly rubbery) effects scenes. The effects themselves aren't works of genius but certainly do suggest that someone on the effects team liked his shape-changing anime creatures with heads and mouths at the wrong places well enough. Which does come in handy for me, as I do too.

I'm also bound to like a competently made traditional monster movie, no matter if it takes place in New York, in space or underwater, so Leviathan is fine by me.

 

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