One of the underrated cult sci-fi movies of the 1990s had a moment that owes its existence to the first Alien movie, according to that film’s director. Ridley Scott released Alien in 1979, and it has influenced almost every sci-fi horror movie ever since. That movie was, at heart, a haunted house movie in space. The “slasher killer” was an alien Xenomorph, and the “Final Girl” was Ellen Ripley, who was part of a crew on a spacecraft exploring an abandoned craft where the monster attacked. However, there was also a moment that shocked viewers when the movie came out, in which Renny Harlin said he stole for his own cult classic.
According to Renny Harlin, in an interview with Empire magazine, he ripped off Alien when he made his 90s sci-fi cult classic, Deep Blue Sea. This all had to do with a surprising death that no one saw coming. “I came up with this. It was completely ripped off from Alien, where Tom Skerritt is the only star in that movie,” Harlin said. “He’s the captain of the ship, and the audience is completely trusting that he’s going to be the lead of the movie, and he goes into this air duct and there’s the alien and boom, he’s gone. And the audience is like, What just happened?’ And then they realise that you can’t trust anything in this movie.”
This is clearly nothing new, since Alfred Hitchcock popularly did this in Psycho. In that film, there was only one star in the movie. Janet Leigh started the film as Marion Crane, and it was this character that the viewers followed when the film started. When Norman Bates killed her in the infamous shower scene early in the movie, no one knew what was going on. Scream also ripped this off with Drew Barrymore dying in the opening scene of that Wes Craven movie. Scream came out three years before Deep Blue Sea.
Of course, the difference is that Scream can say it ripped off a fellow horror movie in Psycho. As a sci-fi movie, Deep Blue Sea can claim to have ripped off Alien. For Deep Blue Sea, Harlin said he ripped off Alien with Samuel L. Jackson. He said he promised Jackson he would cast him in his future movies after The Long Kiss Goodnight. For Deep Blue Sea, he had to create a new character for Jackson that was not part of the original script.
“I didn’t tell Sam anything,” Harlin explained. “I was just like, ‘Hey, Sam, I have this movie and I think this character would be awesome for you. He read it and wrote back, ‘Oh my God. Best Movie Death Ever.’” Harlin said he saw the movie at a theater with an audience, and their reaction to Jackson getting eaten by the shark was a tremendous moment, calling it “one of the greatest satisfactions a director can have.”
Deep Blue Sea Remains An Underrated Hollywood Monster Movie
Image Courtesy of Warner Bros.
When the genetically engineered shark ate Samuel L. Jackson, it was one of the best in any killer shark movie. However, there is a reason that Deep Blue Sea is a cult classic among all the other long-forgotten shark movies. The cast is solid, with Thomas Jane (The Mist), Saffron Burrows (Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD), LL Cool J (NCIS: Los Angeles), and Michael Rapaport (True Romance). This isn’t just a movie with Samuel L. Jackson, although the rest of the cast were not stars yet.
The movie follows a team at a deep-ocean outpost who are testing some scientific research to find a cure for Alzheimer’s. However, they are testing this on genetically enhanced sharks. The problem is that the sharks have increased intellectual levels and become very aggressive, hunting down a way to get into the base, flood it, and kill anyone in their path. Similar to The Meg, this is a killer shark movie that goes for the absurd, which is exactly what works best in this genre.
Critics actually were kind to the movie, despite its clear genre leanings, with a 60% Rotten Tomatoes score, praising it for the “B-movie thrills.” Renny Harlin was experiencing an up-and-down career, with A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Die Hard 2 disappointments after the previous movies in those series, and Cutthroat Island as one of the biggest flops in Hollywood history, while also delivering spectacle movies like Cliffhanger and a fantastically underrated thriller in The Long Kiss Goodnight. If anything, Deep Blue Sea proves he knows how to entertain viewers.
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