Superdeep

The movie does take its sweet time - if you excuse the pun. But once it gets going ... well it is what you could hope for, for a low budget horror movie. Although I'm not even sure how low budget this was. But I think it is safe to assume it wasn't anywhere near any Hollywood horror movie blockbuster money they had to their disposal - not just because this is Russian.

So if you got through the slow first part of the movie, that sets up the rest of it ... congratulations! You have to have a love for horror and creature features to be honest - but why else would you be here if that wasn't true?

An ambitious Russian horror film that borrows liberally from a number of films including Carpenter's 'The Thing,' and 'The Descent.' The plot, about bad things happening at a lab deep in the earth, is muddled and often confusing and takes too long to get going. The English dub isn't great. Worth a watch if you're not expecting much.

I've always generally liked Russian SF both in book and movie form. Tarkovsky's Stalker and of course Solaris come to mind. Even the recent Sputnik was interesting though flawed but The Superdeep got me wanting to jump into the film and slap around a few characters more than once.

It's that kind of bad slasher movie writing where characters who should know better constantly do things that make no sense whatsoever and in this case they're very dramatic about it in that stoic Russian manner.

The sets were great, the special make up effects were very good. It's worth watching but you might want to consider a tranquilizer.

And btw, the Kola borehole is about 8 inches in diameter. It's literally a smallish hole drilled into the earth.

Apparently this was made for $4 million which whilst is a heck of an achievement did hinder it somewhat. The basis for the story is good and lends itself a lot to 'The Thing' in many respects but could have been fleshed out a little more. Probably the biggest grievance I had is the editing, it really needed a lot more work & professionalism in places as one scene would jump to another and you'd be left confused as to what had actually happened. Minor niggles would be the subtitling (I don't speak Russian) which lost a little in translation, the lighting in some scenes which was just too dark and some plot elements (a trained scientist walking unprotected into a room which is clearly a biological hazard?) we're just dumb. With a bit more time and money it would have earned a 7 out of 10 from me.

Just watch Blomkamp´s Zygote on Youtube instead. Same thing without the filler, and the monster is way creepier.