Deep Shock 2003 Horror Movie Review

I love my fair share of underwater thrillers, which there aren’t many of and probably never will be, so when I heard Deep Shock, a movie about giant eels attacking humans, was coming on television, I could allow myself to ignore the fact that this never came out in theaters and probably had a very low budget. I don’t really feel like going over the movie’s premise. Several other people have done so already, and they did a fine job. But I do want to ask a question, did any of you out there find the story just a little familiar?


Every ten minutes I had deja-vu: the, oh, I must have seen this before, which of course I hadn’t. I don’t know if it was by accident, an unintentional, freak occurrence-of-a-mess, but whatever the case, it’s not new. This story, or, at least, parts of it, have been told already.


I’ll make a list of similarities: estranged husband and wife have more problems than just being stuck at the bottom of the sea together and are forced to work as a team (I was willing to overlook this and didn’t catch it until later when everything else started showing up and reminding me), communication loss with the surface rendering them helpless (Also a formula used in many thrillers; ie: Sphere. Didn’t bother me much either.), contention among the crew, and then there was the scene where the woman has a kind of Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio/Lindsey Brigman resurrection in which she bonds with one of the creatures.  This also reminded me of the water scene with the face in The Abyss, and if you’ve seen it, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Of course, when the woman tells everyone, no one really believes. There is a confrontation with the bad guy that, hey after going back to The Abyss and watching one of the scenes, is really close. There is a major problem involving some bombs that the bad guy wants to shoot off and the good guy doesn’t, which causes trouble, chaos, headaches…The ending, having to do with a certain characters’ demise is, again, overly similar.


The coincidences between this very bad film and The Abyss were too much for me to overlook. And the storyline in this film was really, really terrible. Add to that cheesy music from some PBS kids program called CyberChase and you’ve got this terrible looking, low-budget, straight-to-video film that is just not worth the time of day, much less the wasted hours and money it took to create it.  The one good thing about it is that the acting isn’t all that bad.


Overall: The only thing deeply shocking about this movie is that it ever even came out on video. Just one, gigantic, deep rip-off…If you want an underwater thriller worth the time, watch The Abyss instead; it is so much better.