Up from the Depths (1979)

"Your vacation is about to end!"

Plot

Unusual warm water currents carry a rare killer fish to the shores of a Hawaiian beach resort where it begins to kill swimmers and divers. The local hotel owner tries to cover up the presence of the fish, fearing that it will scare all of his guests away but eventually relents and sponsors a hunt for it.

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One of the single worst Jaws rip-offs to emerge in the wake of killer-monster-in-the-water films released soon after Spielberg's masterpiece, Up from the Depths is just awful. I mean all of these films are basically the same thing rehashed with a different creature. Jaws is such a classic film that keeps on rewarding its audience every time you watch it. There's an audience out there that wants to see something similar so why has it been so hard to recreate the same sort of feel as Spielberg's masterpiece? Even something semi-competent would have done in the following years. Arguably the best killer-monster-in-the-water flick released since 1975 has been Jaws 2 and it's not very often that a sequel can hold the tag of being the second best film in its sub-genre.

Rather than an attempting to make a serious, scary horror-thriller, Up from the Depths has a horrendous comic tone which doesn't mix well and was how the film was originally set out to be. Director Charles B. Griffith, realising the script he had signed up for was atrocious and the fish model that had been built was too goofy-looking, turned his shoot towards making it a comedy. By the time he'd returned to infamous producer Roger Corman, seventy-five minutes had already been cut from it and Up from the Depths was to become a straight horror, with some re-shoots to pad out the running time. Some of this comedic tone still manages to creep through despite the best efforts of Corman to eradicate it. But before I talk more about the film itself, let's look at the fish that Griffith described as goofy-looking. We want to see what sort of menace under the water can drag us to our deaths and the front cover certainly looks promising. Films can find it hard to get distributed - it's a problem as big now as it was back in the 70s and 80s and usually the only way lower budget films were ever able to get any sort of hype or create a buzz was to create a front cover for the VHS or DVD which would attract people to it. You can trawl through any horror sub-genre from during the 80s video boom to find all manner of weird and wonderful covers which promise a whole lot more than they actually deliver.

Up from the Depths may possibly be the biggest culprit yet! The killer fish looks nothing like the terrifying, toothy beast that's about to snack on a female swimmer on the cover. Instead, it looks like a huge plastic pool toy and swims in a completely straight line all of the time, no doubt due to the limitations of the model. We are given a couple of fleeting glimpses of it during the attack scenes but these just consist of the same shot of the fish used time and time again followed up by a shot of some red, bubbly water to indicate that it's succeeded in feeding. That's it. You don't see much at all. You just assume it's succeeded in eating it's intended target. The scenes are edited so quickly with split-second glimpses of this and that, making it difficult to put together the set pieces. I'm sure they re-use the same shots too. The fish is also pretty impervious to any attempts to kill it including having the most bullet proof skin ever. It is well fed although its menu consists solely of people introduced and killed off within the same scene - it's a bit hard trying to envisage escaping from the gaping maw below.

With such little fish action, a lot of screen time is left to fill and that is taken up by the human sub-plots and lots of comedy. We are bombarded with drunks - drunken boat captains, drunken businessmen and drunken tourists. And best (or worst) of all is the comic relief given by the resort manager and his brightly coloured suits. There are also some unnecessary subplots about a tourist and his wife wanting to find some buried treasure and another one about a Playmate visiting the resort for a photo shoot. Whilst this does give us our required nudity, it's unnecessary - even the fish looks embarrassed having to eat these people. However, there is one hilarious moment, whether it's intentional or not, as the group who try and hunt the fish at the end decide to lure it by dragging a recently-deceased guy laced with explosives behind the boat as if he were some sort of fishing lure.

This isn't an actors film and Sam Bottoms and Susanne Reed have the misfortune of being the two main stars getting caught out in whether this film is meant to be serious or silly. Neither do anything wrong in the way they're set up to fail with the terrible script. Kedric Wolfe is embarrasing as the Mayor Vaughan-like hotel manager Forbes; truly a character you wish to see eaten by the fish before he gets any more cringey. Talented character actor R. Lee Ermey makes one of his earliest appearances on film here as a bar patron. One of modern cinema's greatest composers, the late James Horner, scores the soundtrack but goes uncredited.

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Final Verdict

It came ‘up from the depths’ and within ten minutes of this crap you would wish it would go back down too. Up from the Depths would be one of the worst Jaws knock-offs ever made had it not been for the moments of inspirational insanity.

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Up from the Depths Director(s): Charles B. Griffith Writer(s): Alfred M. Sweeney (screenplay) Actor(s): Sam Bottoms, Susanna Reed, Virgil Fyre, Kedric Wolfe, Charles Howerton, Denise Hayes, Charles Doherty Duration: 85 mins