Proteus (1995)
- Andrew Smith
- 3 hours ago
- 7 min read
"In the middle of the ocean, a new form of horror is taking shape."
Plot
A group of drug smugglers take shelter on an oil rig when their ship explodes out at sea. At first, it appears that there is no one on board and it has been abandoned. However, they find that the rig is home to a secret genetic engineering laboratory where the latest experiment has broken free.
Review
Based upon enjoyably icky creature feature novel Slimer by Harry Adam Knight (Australian writer John Brosnan using a pseudonym) and directed by Bob Keen, a special effects and make-up effects supervisor who was on hand for Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, Superman, Alien, Highlander, Hellraiser, Candyman and Dog Soldiers (and that's to name a few!) one would have high hopes that Proteus, the name of a God taken from Greek myth who had the ability to change his shape and mutate, would be something special. Sadly, the formulaic years of sci-fi horrors before it meant that the resulting film comes off as little more than a bog standard cross between Alien and The Thing, without most of the good bits. Proteus doesn't really try to hide it's plagiarism as there's hardly a single original idea present but, given that this was a rare UK genre effort, I can't be too harsh on it. The fact it even got made during the 90s is a mega achievement in its own right.
This film version literally takes two legendary films and surgically removes the good bits. Every single one. It's just a disjointed mess. And it doesn't even attempt to hide the blatant plagiarism. I mean, there isn't a single original idea present anywhere. It genuinely is a masterclass in what happens when you mistake the superficial elements of a genre for the actual mechanics of storytelling. The filmmakers essentially looked at the winning formulas of Alien and The Thing, saw that audiences loved them, and just figured they could xerox the premise and cash the check. In theory, an oil rig is the perfect crucible for horror. It gives you the exact same environmental advantages as the spaceship Nostromo in Alien or the Antarctic research base in The Thing - that inescapable isolation. There are these claustrophobic labyrinthine passageways, dark industrial rooms, and this constant heavy mechanical hum that can just drown out the sound of anything approaching. It is an environment that should, frankly, do half the work for any director. But cloning Alien isn't just about stealing the physical environment and thinking that sticking people on a dark, isolated rig would just automatically generate really Ridley Scott levels of tension. He makes you feel the cold metal and the total expendability of that crew. When a filmmaker just builds a dark corridor and expects you to feel scared, simply because you remember being scared in a similar corridor in a much better film, the illusion totally collapses. It’s the faint echo of another director’s work and an echo which loses its impact quickly as Proteus unravels.
If you're going to blatantly rip off special effects masterclasses like Alien and the Thing, you would at least expect the monster effects to bring the heat visually, especially when you look at who is actually sitting in the director's chair for Proteus. Director Bob Keen was literally a special effects guru, how is it possible that Proteus’ effects look so cheap? Even if the script is a total disaster, the monster should look incredible because the director knows exactly how to build one from the ground up. Keen really should have just stuck to his core competency because he was so overwhelmed trying to navigate the macro demands of directing the film, the actual special effects team was left floundering without his specific hands-on artistry. The team building the monster desperately needed Bob Keen, the effects artist, but they were stuck with Bob Keen, the struggling director. Everything in a monster movie ultimately lives or dies by the titular threat. These characters are stuck on a rig with the human shark DNA hybrid. The script establishes early on that the creature absorbs its victims. It essentially takes over their bodies. Instead of showing a terrifying shark-human hybrid physically stalking people through the corridors, the filmmakers rely almost entirely on point of view or POV shots. The characters talking and acting like they are possessed by some malignant force until the need arises for them to dissolve in a gooey mess.
In Proteus, hiding the monster isn't an artistic choice to build dread, it's a purely administrative choice to balance a spreadsheet. They use the POV shot to save the production from having to execute expensive creature effects, and the piece draws a very sharp, unforgiving contrast with The Thing. Carpenter also featured a monster that hid in plain sight by mimicking its victims. But Carpenter used that hidden monster premise to generate intense, suffocating, character-driven paranoia: who is infected and who isn't? He then punctuated that paranoia with groundbreaking, horrifying physical effects when the monster finally revealed itself. But Proteus never makes that pivot, it just uses the concept as an excuse to do less work. An audience can always subconsciously feel the difference. You can tell when a creator is hiding a flaw as an artistic stylistic choice versus when they are hiding it because of poor resource management. The eventual reveal of the creature in the finale shows us what looks like a cheap leftover rubber prop from a much older film. Ironically, the physical creature looked reasonable enough that the effects team should have just had a little more faith in their work and shown it earlier. But the budget was stretched so incredibly thin that they couldn't even afford proper gore to sell the threat. Aside from one specific throat-ripping scene, the deaths are overwhelmingly gooey rather than gory.
One can only hope for some gritty, character-driven moments to anchor the plot. But the writing is just as uninspired as the visuals. The character work is, frankly, almost non-existent. The script provides these incredibly thin protagonists, which creates an immediate barrier for the audience. Remember, these characters are supposed to be hardened, desperate, illicit drug smugglers who just survived a fiery ocean explosion. But they look and act more like the cast of a teen sitcom. Just mentally picture taking the cast of a pristine 90s high school sitcom, throwing them onto a grimy drug boat, covering them in a little bit of fake soot, and then asking an audience to genuinely cheer for them as they make every single wrong horror movie decision possible. It completely shatters a suspension of disbelief. An audience needs to buy into the grime and the moral ambiguity of these smugglers to feel grounded in the reality of the film. If they look perfectly coiffed and act like teenagers, the viewer just disconnects. And if the audience fundamentally does not care whether these characters live or die, then your monster is no longer a terrifying threat. It just becomes a garbage disposal!
Garbage disposal perfectly captures the vibe. Because the characters aren't just miscast; they are written to be profoundly stupid, making terrible choices and constantly splitting up to investigate strange noises alone in the dark. They are practically begging the monster to eat them. It is the most cliched, eye-rolling trope in the genre, but it gets worse. The lazy writing doesn't just stop at how the characters behave; it fundamentally affects how the story is delivered to the audience. There is a dreaded exposition dump involving a videotape that the characters stumble across in one of the rooms. There is this agonisingly long sequence where you think it's going to be a quick warning but instead, the scientist painstakingly explains exactly what has happened, what the creature's origin is, and literally the entire backstory of the lab. From a psychological standpoint, cheap exposition like that actively destroys the mechanics of the narrative. Tension is entirely dependent on momentum and the fear of the unknown so when you literally pause the present-day action of characters running for their lives to sit them down in front of a television screen so it can explain the past to them, you lose all the momentum. There’s no way to feel scared when you’re taking mental notes about a corporate back story.
The cast is not universally terrible despite the writing. There are a few bright spots or at least a few actors who really tried to row the boat. Craig Fairbrass gets a solid nod for managing to pull off the tough guy action hero role. He acts the part of a gritty drug dealer surprisingly well, despite leaning heavily into his British accent to do most of the intimidating part. On the flip side, there is the absolute tragic waste of Doug Bradley, almost unrecognisable under layers of heavy ‘old man’ make-up. Bradley, famous worldwide for playing the iconic villain Pinhead in the Hellraiser franchise and a massive heavyweight in the genre, is brought on board for little more than a cup of coffee towards the end as the classic evil corporate boss who wants to secure the monster for company profit. If you’ve seen one of these films, then you the golden rule where the arrogant suit who tries to protect the creature for financial gain is absolutely 100% guaranteed to get eaten by it in the third act. Ricco Ross, who played Private Frost, the man who gets incinerated in Aliens, clearly didn’t have enough of being hunted by monsters in dark, mechanical environments and features here too.
Final Verdict
Proteus is like looking at a complex car engine that has been taken apart and put back together completely wrong. The script has borrowed heavily from superior films without any real clue as to how to assemble it all in a productive fashion. Creating something great isn't just about combining a list of popular ingredients and hoping for the best. You can have the isolated oil rig, the bizarre shark human hybrid concept, and the special effects artist on your payroll but if you don't understand why those elements work together, all you're going to be left with is a very murky, gooey mess which doesn’t promise a lot and delivers even less. Proteus has a total lack of visceral impact, a bit of a travesty considering the novel at least went into some lengthier descriptions of the carnage the monster causes, and comes off as very uninspiring and pointless.
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Proteus Director(s): Bob Keen Writer(s): John Brosnan (novel "Slimer"). Robert Firth (additional material) Actor(s): Craig Fairbrass, Toni Barry, William Marsh, Jennifer Calvert, Robert Firth, Margot Steinberg, Ricco Ross, Jordan Page, Nigel Pegram, Doug Bradley Duration: 97 mins |  |
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