Alien from the Deep (1989)

"It’s gigantic, evil, and invincible. It’s the…"

Plot

Somewhere deep in the jungle, a chemical company has been dumping tons of atomic waste into an active volcano. A pair of environmentalists try to expose this illegal practice, teaming up with a snake farmer who lives in the jungle nearby. However, the energy spike produced by the atomic waste reacting with the lava has attracted an alien which proceeds to run rampage through the factory.

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If there’s one thing that the Italians loved doing in the late 1970s and 1980s, it’s shamelessly ripping off American pop culture hits and producing their own pale imitations. If it wasn’t numerous copycats of Jaws or zombie films which borrowed heavily from Dawn of the Dead, it was identikit replicas of Alien or Aliens. Alien from the Deep is one of the more blatant exploitation efforts though I’m guessing from the end product offered, director Antonio Margheriti hadn’t actually seen Alien or Aliens outside of a few still shots of the alien itself and maybe a few clips of Ripley’s battle with the Alien Queen and has crafted something more in line with his regular output – that of jungle action films – than anything truly sci-fi horror. This wasn’t quite exactly what I thought I was getting in for, though whether that’s a good thing or not remains to be seen.

The first half of the film plays out like an extended The X-Files episode, some sort of eco-thriller where there’s a lot of the main characters playing hide and seek with the guards inside the factory to uncover what is going on, a lot of chasing through the jungle and some gunfire and explosions. There is much talking and much exposition which, let’s face it, a film like this doesn’t really need a lot of. You get the feeling that Alien from the Deep is already spinning its wheels, the result of a whole narrative being built up around the presence of an alien monster which the budget was never going to allow us to see much of. As previously mentioned, Margheriti was known for directing lots of action and adventure films so expect to see plenty of that here as the director plants his feet on comfortable ground. It’s all handled very flatly, with little sense of urgency to get things moving towards…you know, the alien that we were promised in the title!

Alien from the Deep features an alien that is buried so deep in the film, it takes around an hour for it to finally turn up (in a ninety-minute run time no less) and even then, you’ll have to make do with a giant robotic claw chasing people around for the most part before the full thing shows up in the finale. At least they don’t have a guy in a suit but rather some cumbersome giant-sized creation, clearly being hoisted up into the air by a crane, but no less impressive for it, and bathed in a dazzling array of flashing lights, smoke and pyrotechnics. Quite how this gigantic creature manages to work its way around the low ceilings and claustrophobic spaces of the factory is a question that the film leaves unanswered. Crowbarring in the alien link seems pointless – this thing just crash-lands in a meteor, drawn to Earth by the energy emitted from the lava and toxic waste combination, and that’s it. It’s a flimsy connection, one which would have been better served making it some radioactive mutant or toxic waste creation. But then they wouldn’t be able to use the very Giger-like design for the creature nor shoehorn in a finale which has been ‘borrowed’ from James Cameron’s Aliens complete with construction loader duel. There’s a lot of miniature work across the whole film and it adds plenty to Alien from the Deep’s limited cheesy charm, the ‘highlight’ being a ridiculous speedboat crash.

At least Alien from the Deep delivers some gory goods but nowhere near what you’d expect from and Italian exploitation film. There are plenty of expendable grunts running around the plant to be killed off when needed, mostly off-screen or with glimpses of the giant claw. As expected, the alien also has some sort of acid/toxic blood which will melt people upon contact, allowing the filmmakers a chance to get a bit more creative with the make-up effects. However, with this being made in the late 80s, years of censorship had taken their toll and, along with diminishing budgets for Italian studios, its obvious where the cutbacks came. I can only imagine how much more gory this could have been had it been made five years earlier.

Square-jawed American character actor Charles Napier must have signed up for the free holiday to the Philippines where the film was shot. He’s the best thing about the film by a mile, chewing the scenery with aplomb as the slightly unhinged Colonel Kovacks. He turns craziness up to its maximum here but he knew what he was getting in for so makes the best of a bad situation. Julia McKay is an attractive female lead but the problem that she, Daniel Bosch (as her love interest) and all of the other non-Napier performers have, is that they’ve been badly dubbed over. And I mean badly. The dialogue is terrible anyway but the dubbed voices don’t help matters, making silly lines sound far worse than they should be – “don’t you touch me, you snake squeezer” has to rank up there as one of the worst lines from a genre movie ever.

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Final Verdict

If you sit down to watch a film like Alien from the Deep, you know pretty much exactly what you’re getting yourself in for. Is it a daft B-movie which has some redeeming qualities? Yes. Is it a good movie? No. It’s a fairly uninspired Aliens rip-off, made at the end of a dying cycle by people who didn’t specialise in this sort of genre flick so any charm that the film has is completely accidental!

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Alien from the Deep Director(s): Antonio Margheriti Writer(s): Tito Carpi Actor(s): Daniel Bosch, Marina Giulia Cavalli, Robert Marius, Luciano Pigozzi, Charles Napier, Roberto Dell'Acqua, David Brass, Kenneth Peerless Duration: 91 mins