Doctor Movie: Episode 317: Lords Of The Deep

Show Notes

Join Doctor Movie for a look at your favorite movies from behind the steering wheel. We dive down into the depths of cheap knockoff cash grab movies with this Roger Coreman production of Lords Of The Deep. Lets have a little fun.

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Aliens are attacking an underwater sea lab, and Priscilla Barnes makes KY jelly that gives you an acid trip.

That and a whole lot more.

Well, I hope not a whole lot more.

Right here on Doctor Movie.

Hey everybody, what's happening?

Welcome back to another episode of...

Dr.

Movie.

The show that's covering movies while on the road.

Movies on the move.

Hey, that's a good one.

Movies on the move, because, you know, I do this while driving in the car.

Hence all the noise in the background.

So yeah, it's hard to do a high quality audio show while driving a car, you know, especially a noisy car.

So anywho, here we are.

We are talking about the 1989 cash grab.

I don't know how else to say it.

This is what any Roger Coreman produced movie from the 70s on pretty much is, is a cash grab of trying to beat somebody to the punch.

Lords Of The Deep is the cash grab of the abyss, more than anything else.

From 1989, came out five months before the abyss came out.

So yeah, I love the pretentious moves of, we don't really know what this movie is gonna be about, so we're just gonna guess and try to rip it off without really seeing it.

Because we know there's a lot of hype around the movie, so let's just make something.

There was a bunch of aquatic horror movies that came out at this point.

You had Deep Star Six, you had Leviathan, The Rift, the list goes on and on.

And The Abyss was kind of lumped in there, even though it's a higher quality movie.

And this is obviously a stab at trying to get in on some of that money, because that's about the only good thing I can say about this one.

I was always intrigued.

I thought the artwork looked kind of cool because I kind of like the aquatic horror stuff, man.

But this one, shamefully enough, got a 2.7 out of 10 on IMDB, so 15% on Rotten Tomatoes.

So yeah, it's not looked at from a very positive aspect.

Directed by Mary Ann Fisher.

I have not seen anything besides this movie that Mary Ann Fisher has done.

However, I do find that kind of sad because she made a movie called The Unlucky Leprechaun.

I kind of want to see that one.

Yeah, look that one up.

Tell me what you think about that.

Let's read a little synopsis here.

An alien life form visits the commander and crew of a corporate research submarine.

Yeah, we've got a C-Lab going on here.

And yeah, guess what?

Aliens.

Didn't see that coming.

As far as the cast, really only two people to talk about.

Bradford Dillman.

Prolific career.

Lots of stuff.

You know, I really know him for Piranha more than anything else.

He has done some Coreman stuff, and that's kind of how I know him.

But Priscilla Barnes, right?

Terry, from Three's Company.

Also in Devil's Rejects.

I mean, you know, she's been in a lot of stuff.

But will always be known as, you know, the new Chrissy in Three's Company, right?

She plays Claire.

She is the scientist on the ship, or the sub, or whatever this thing is, the Sea Lab, and Bradford Dillman plays the, like the commander, right?

So he's got a crew that's working there.

They're underwater.

They're looking at stuff, yada yada.

Is there not a lot of watch?

Deadburn, I hate when they can't find these.

Let's see, here we go.

That's a where to watch.

Okay, it's probably better that we don't have a lot of watch, just saying.

So we'll go ahead and just jump into this one.

It's the typical setup, except it's done on the Coreman budget.

Um, I got to start off by talking about these uniforms, because it's almost like somebody's grandma was making jumpsuits, and they had some upholstery left over for some, I don't know, van seats.

I don't know, when you see this, you're going to be like, wait a minute, I've seen that pattern on somebody's couch.

And I guess they thought that looked futuristic.

But they got this horrible grandmother red trim around them.

Oh, they're just horrendous.

They are absolutely horrendous.

I can't believe that they said, yo, yeah, this looks like an official C-Lab jumpsuit.

Oh, they're bad.

They're really bad.

This is like, if somebody's making costumes for a high school play, this might be something they would come up with.

And if you think that's bad, when we finally see the aliens, we got a lot to talk about there, too.

But you can tell this is a combination of stuff, right?

They are trying to beat the abyss at the punch, for sure, because the story is so much like the abyss, because you even get a moral message at the end of it, of how humans are bad.

You know, aliens good, humans bad, because we got too big for our britches, and stop destroying the ozone layer.

Like that matters to creatures that live underwater.

Just saying.

You know, they are not worried about getting a sunburn, especially these creatures, because they are white as white can be.

Um, gosh.

Priscilla Barnes is working in her lab, and she ends up creating KY Jelly.

And she sticks her finger in it.

And takes an acid trip.

And it kind of looks like the beginning of the Buck Rogers movie when he's like going down the hole and the thing spinning around him.

It just kind of would remind me of.

And she just gets little snippets of weird psychedelic things.

Don't know what it means.

She just knows, wow, that's some powerful KY right there.

And, uh, well, that's going on.

They hear a disturbance outside, and one guy goes out there in a diving suit.

And when he comes back, he's just a pile of jelly, just like the stuff that she made.

There's no body inside, just some jelly.

So we don't really know what happened to him.

Like I said, this movie is a combination of the abyss.

It's got a little touch of aliens in it, or alien, take your pick.

You've got pretty much every Cameron movie.

You've got a little bit of 2001, and we've got a little dash of what else is in this.

Well, let's just stick with that.

That's enough.

A little bit of Day of the Earth Stood Still.

Again, it's that Coreman thing, where they just pull from different sources and slap it together, and there's your movie.

And that's really how this thing runs.

It is extremely dull.

You kind of get a little antsy because there's other life forms, but when you see the life form, you're like, really?

This is what we came up with?

I mean, they're basically...

They look like a stingray mixed with a pterodactyl, but made out of white Play-Doh.

Pretty horrendous.

They got big red eyes with black circles around them, which, you know, if you live underwater and you never sleep, I guess that's pretty standard.

But yeah, the aliens look like a fifth-grade art school project.

They're terrible.

They are terrible.

But apparently they friend up with Priscilla Barnes because she's the only person that's there that's, I don't know, pure of heart.

I don't know.

There's no real explanation.

It's just that thing of they read the script, I guess, of The Abyss and said, oh, well, she befriends the aliens because they got to contact with somebody.

I guess Priscilla Barnes in this case is the one they pick.

So she starts becoming friends with the alien, but you can't tell if the aliens are good or bad because they, you know, they try to frame the aliens for doing something.

At the meantime, our commander of the C-Lab is contacting the evil talking head, right?

We got to have that guy that pops up on the screen.

That's the guy that's funding the whole corporation.

And it's Roger Coreman himself.

So you know you're in trouble when Roger Coreman, who is one of the nicest people to ever exist, is the bad guy, right?

So, yeah.

And he does okay.

I mean, it's a candy old thing, kind of, right?

But yeah, so in just like alien form, the movie Alien, where we want to actually capture these creatures and use them to our advantage instead of coexisting.

We want to use them for military grade, and we are willing to go to any expense to capture them.

Doesn't matter if we have to kill everybody on the team.

Once they discover the aliens and everybody is talking about it, then our commander of the ship tries to get everybody to sign a waiver that if they ever get back home from this excursion, they can't talk about what they saw.

And they are like, are you crazy?

We are going to tell everybody.

I am not signing this.

So at that point, he is like, okay, we just got to start killing them.

And of course, you kind of get a who done it thing there for a while, but you pretty much know who is doing it.

But the computer is running the entire ship, a la Hal from 2001, and able to cut off people's oxygen in certain rooms.

I mean, it's 2001, except it's being commanded by our leader of the ship.

So you got all this going on.

You got people starting to drop left and right.

You got Priscilla Barnes who has a boyfriend that's on the ship, or a companion, whatever they are.

And so you got that, uh-oh, I kind of care about somebody thing going on, which don't really add up to a whole lot.

But at one point, Priscilla Barnes gets in a smaller sub and goes off following two of our creatures to take her to a location.

And she gets out, and they've made this set that's kind of like a nucleus that she gets into that, again, looks like another art school project.

But in the middle of the ocean, I guess this is maybe the alien ship that they flew in, but it's made out of the KY jelly, but it's hardened.

I don't know.

It's just what we got here, folks, I'm telling you.

And when she gets out of the ship and gets in there, some of the people that have died are magically in there.

So you can't tell if she's having another LSD flash or what.

But I guess the goo is how she communicates with them, or maybe the whole thing is just a dream, and she's just, you know, hallucinating all this.

Who knows?

It really doesn't matter.

And that's kind of this movie.

She ends up going back to the ship to save her boyfriend, and that's when you find out that, you know, our commander is knocking everybody off.

And Priscilla Burns goes to save her boyfriend, and he's knocked out on the floor.

She picks him up, and they get into a block, and the commander has the door shut, sealed off, having the oxygen taken out.

They escape through an air vent, but it's still not enough.

They're dying, and then all of a sudden, one of those creatures is under there with her, and it reaches up and puts its...

It's not a hand.

It's a...

Well, it's like a stingray, flappy arm thing, and covers her mouth, and all of a sudden, she can breathe.

So think about the iconic scene in the abyss, right?

Where they've gone back to even like using the embiotic fluid to keep you alive under deep, deep, deep, deep water pressure, you know, because, I don't know, they explain the reason why.

So this is their answer by an alien just covering your mouth, and, hey, you can breathe through the alien, even though I'm going, all right, how's this aquatic creature able to survive out of the water, and on this ship?

These things we don't know.

It would seem like if these creatures could do that, why would they stay underwater?

Why wouldn't they come out to the rest of the world?

I don't know.

But anyways, they end up getting, you know, those two get back on a ship and go back to the nucleus of the aliens.

And while they're going there, we get the speech of, we were created by these aliens long ago, and we got too big for our breaches, and we're destroying the planet.

And again, why do these aliens care?

If they're aliens, why do they care about this planet?

They shouldn't.

They live somewhere else.

They're just tourists.

Anywho, I don't know.

I...

Here we go.

I love the planet.

I do.

But I agree with George Carlin when it comes to all this mess.

Are we really affecting the world?

No.

We are a surface nuisance.

The planet is fine.

It's the people that are screwed, right?

Sure, we do think...

I mean, we eat food every day that's dangerous to us, much less trying to keep a planet alive.

I mean, yeah, that's just...

That's who we are.

That's what we do.

We're people.

We live.

And the more and more we grow and the more we live and our lifespans are longer, the more people we're going to have on the planet.

But if you're telling me that because a cow craps out in the field, we're destroying the planet, we've gotten a little too big for our britches, right?

We are a surface nuisance.

When the world gets tired of us, it'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.

So that's just kind of my opinion on it.

I think what I do from a day to now, I don't believe in going around and just trying to trash the place either.

But the fact that I think that we can turn things around and heal the ozone layer is about as stupid as we can think we can save world hunger because we're just not capable of that.

And that's a pretty stark statement too, but hey, people live in the desert.

If you can't get them out of the desert, they're probably not going to eat very well.

Just saying.

Anywho, just my opinion.

I don't like to get very opinionated on stuff, but I don't know, when something becomes kind of preachy to me and you go, wait a minute, I mean, I get it, and I understand you're trying to give that responsibility back to the people, and that's fine.

But, I don't know.

Maybe I'm a naysayer, I don't know.

I do care about the planet.

I think it's important, obviously.

But, the world heals itself.

We can't heal it.

We're just a part of what happens here.

So, take that for what it is.

You know, even if we fixed everything here that we could do, other countries are not going to, right?

That's just kind of how it works.

So, anywho, that's probably better than this movie we watched.

This is not a good movie.

Even in a late night, I'm up sick or insomnia, I can't, you know, it's just not a good movie.

It's extremely slow moving.

You feel like you've seen every bit of this before, except for the KY jelly.

That's kind of it.

I can't believe I've talked this long about it.

So, I don't know, I don't recommend it.

I give it a one out of five.

Enter at your own risk.

Yeah, who knows?

You may have fun with it.

It's a Coreman production, so you kind of know what you're getting.

I just felt it was really boring.

And usually that's not the case with a Coreman thing.

There's usually some unique charm to it.

This one's just kind of dry.

So that's my take on this one, folks.

I hope you enjoy the show.

Let me know if you got any recommendations or if you're going to beat me up about, you know, the world, all that kind of stuff.

I can take it.

I'm a grown man.

But anywho, that's kind of where I am on this.

And Lord, if, you know, maybe we wouldn't need movies like this if we took care of the world.

Maybe that's a good positive way to look at it.

If we took better care of the Earth, we wouldn't have to have Priscilla Barnes, you know, teaming up with aliens to fight Roger Coreman.

Who knows?

Alright, folks, that's it for this one.

We will check you later.