The Deep Ones

Badly written, badly acted, you name it and its bad in this movie. At some point during the filming I feel like someone would have raised the point that this movie was on-fire garbage and that all production should be stopped and all work prints destroyed for the good of humanity. Nope.

If you have a toilet, watch it flush for an hour and a half and you will come away with the exact same experience as this awful, awful film.

So, this has decent production values, but the film falls into comical presentation with the actors. It follows well with the Lovecraft plot, but the fanaticism of the group turns the acting into pantomime. And unfortunately the film doesn't want to answer this or call into question the quality of acting. Harumph.

Besides the terrible acting, this hardly compares to Dagon or some of the previous Cthulu mythos movies. Lately there seems to be a number of these trying to cash in on this Lovecraft creation. Unfortunately none of them are any good.

This could have been a mostly mediocre movie that killed the time but was never anything special. I liked the bones of the concept, and taking on a more female cosmic fear of being mother to monsters.

But the score irredeemably dropped by mixing up the mythos AND by having a book of Lovecraft stories in the movie without explanation. Like, was Lovecraft actually a prophet and all these people clued into the truth via his writings? And since I was already mad at that, I was cheesed off that it was very obviously from the public library, but on the old man's shelf as if it were a collectible.

The acting is bad, but about on par with cheesy horror. The script certainly doesn't do them any favors, and the directing is mostly boring but then tries way too hard. The pacing is awful, and the 'creepiness' is from some flailing tentacles and over-the-top 'bizazrre' reactions. The practical Deep One effects on the community members - of which there were not enough to be properly inspired by Shadow Over Innsmouth - looked like they came from Spirit Halloween.

So, what would have normally been a merely lame movie is kind of an insult to the Lovecraft genre. Maybe the writers should have done more than skimmed the Wiki about the mythos to get their ideas.

As a big H.P. Lovecraft fan, I'm always delighted to discover new movies that are based on his stories, especially when it comes to the Cthulhu Mythos.

And because I'm such a fan, I'm willing to accept alot of shortcomings, but I'm afraid this film just doesn't offer anything worthwhile.

The acting is mostly bad, only Robert Miano stands out with a solid performance. A big problem is the main cast, which is just not good and not very likeable. I had a hard time sitting through the whole movie, waiting for some Lovecraftian Horror, that just never came. And just flailing tentacles around doesn't do the trick.

And if you're into blood and gore - too bad, because there's barely anything of it.

The production value itself was okay, the film didn't look like a low budget flick most of the time, even though some practical effects and masks looked rather cheap.

Long story short - I wouldn't recommend this movie, not even for Lovecraft and Cthulhu fans. Just go and watch "Dagon" instead!