Leviathan (1989)

Although offering nothing new and blatantly ripping off both "Alien" and "The Thing", I nonetheless had a good time with this one. Hey...what can I say? I'm easily entertained. On the bottom of the ocean floor, an American mining expedition has discovered a sunken Russian sub containing something far worse that some dead commies. After exploring the ship and retrieving several items, the crewmembers learn from the captains log that everyone aboard the ship died from some mysterious disease that broke out amongst the Russian crew. We later find out that the Russian higher ups had been tinkering with various genetic alterations to human D.N.A, and slipped the said experiment into the unknowing crews vodka supply. Of course, this information comes later on in the movie, after several crewmembers have already sampled the Russian vodka and thus unknowingly injected the tainted D.N.A. into their bloodstreams. Once the foreign D.N.A. starts to kick in, it causes the infected individual to mutate into a sort of fish monster, and reminiscent of "The Thing" looks to absorb others and with it their intelligence. The cast is actually pretty likeable, particularly the tall British brunette with the long legs. Whew. Even the ones that you know are there just to be monster bait you sorta get to like. Speaking of the monster, the creature was created by Stan Winston Studios and from what we see of it, it looks pretty good. The only time it suffers is when we see full views of it, and then it looks like a pile of latex sitting on a cart. The gore f/x is kept to a somewhat minimum, though we get a chestburster scene ala "Alien" and one cool part where an eel digs it's way into some poor dudes innards...I can dig it. You won't find anything new or groundbreaking here, just ninety minutes of dumb fun...and what's so wrong with that? Way better than the other undersea terror that was released that year, the piss awful "Deep Star Six".