Released at the tail end of the eighties, Leviathan followed a string of major projects for Stan Winston—he had worked with Rob Bottin on The Thing, and after opening Stan Winston Studio, crafted the effects for The Terminator, Aliens, and Predator (as well as Invaders From Mars and Pumpkinhead), establishing that team to be the top studio for creature effects in Hollywood. Winston himself was well past his Gargoyles mask-masking days, acting as Producer of Creature Effects alongside his crew, including Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr. (the latter once again tasked with wearing the monster suit), who would move on to Tremors immediately after this. With those in mind, one can’t help but look at Leviathan as a victory lap, the kind of movie that these people could make in their sleep. It doesn’t change the game like Stan Winston Studios prior projects, but it allows them another chance to show why they got those earlier movies in the first place.
As pointed out in most mainstream reviews from the period, Leviathan feels like someone decided to take Alien and change the location from outer space to underwater, which is the standard way to make a space-like Sci-Fi setting without setting it in space (1989 saw a preponderance of underwater Sci-Fi creature features, with The Abyss ending up the most prominent one.) The set design of the film (art direction provided by prolific and influential designer Ron Cobb, who of course had worked on Alien) appropriates all those practical, futuristic machines and corridors filled with grates and exposed piping that we came to love in Alien, with bulky diving suits and computers aplenty. Taking place 16,000 feet deep in the Atlantic Ocean, the story focuses on a mining vessel digging up silver and other minerals on the rocky ocean floor, and so we even get a sense of blue collar working camaraderie among its diverse crew of semi-stock characters, just like You-Know-What. The primary thing driving this crew is knowing that they only have a few days left before they get to go home, a feeling I’m sure we can all relate to even if we haven’t been trapped in the crushing depths of the Atlantic—the mixed working class crew has been codified as the cliche cast for a monster movie, but it’s still a bit more grounded-feeling than the old cliches of scientists and the military men trapped in the same situation.
(And hey, since they’re making a movie like Alien, why not get the people who made the effects for its sequel on board as well? Makes complete sense.)
This premise has all the makings of an Italian knock-off—and the credits tell you that this is very much an Italian production, produced by Dino De Laurentiis’ older brother Luigi and nephew Aurelio—but the list of names involved also tells you why it doesn’t necessarily feel that way. Winston’s studio and Cobb are here, with a story and script by Blade Runner co-writer David Peoples alongside Die Hard writer Jeb Stuart, music by Jerry Goldsmith, and George P. Cosmatos of Rambo: First Blood Part 2 and Cobra as the director. On a technical level, it feels like a lightly over-performing B-movie, which puts it well below the status of the movie it’s clearly riffing on, but above similar schlock of the period.
The cast rounds it out, with Peter Weller in the lead as geologist Steven Beck (a weary managerial type not unlike his later role in Screamers), and a crew that includes Ernie Hudson, Hector Elizondo, Daniel Stern, and Richard Crenna. Meg Foster, the actress famous for piercing gray eyes, plays the role of scummy corporate executive giving Beck commands via computer video phone, representing the otherwise faceless Tri-Oceanic Corp. that lies to and manipulates the mining crew as their situation changes. That’s another blatant riff on that other movie, but at least they internalized the small, workaday details as well, portraying this cast as a group of people getting on each other’s nerves and becoming increasingly cranky in their deep sea isolation, finding all sorts of regular people ways to pass the excruciating days (the way their very quotidian living quarters blend into the mess of Sci-Fi machinery provides an enjoyable contrast.) For example, Daniel Stern plays the resident annoying creep, nicknamed “Sixpack”, who plays “practical jokes” and sexually harasses the female crew members Bowman (Lisa Eilbacher) and Williams (Amanda Pays), before hopping into his capsule bed filled with pornographic posters and magazines (meaning that Penthouse gets a Special Thanks in the end credits)—the exact sort of person you want to have around for months at the bottom of the sea. Weller’s Beck acts as the quietly exasperated schoolteacher to the crew, forced into the job by Tri-Oceanic, and all of them just want to leave, especially after a technical problem almost suffocates one of the crew, DeJesus (Michael Carmine.)
A disciplinary expedition given to Williams and Sixpack after a childish back-and-forth leads them to discover a sunken ship hidden beyond a field of tube worms—the crew doctor, played by Crenna, is able to read the Russian name of the ship as, get this, “Leviathan”, and Sixpack finds a box of stuff onboard that includes bottles of vodka, a video tape, and a load of death certificates. Beck and “Doc” watch the video and discover that something strange happened aboard the ship, and that the Russians intentionally sunk it and destroyed all records of its existence, while Sixpack and Bowman take a swig of the vodka they found in the box. Things do not go well for them.
This is a decidedly classical structure, where there’s a lot of ramp-up and the “true” form of the monster is not seen until very close to the end of the movie. The emphasis is on body horror here, and the effects crew find ways to push it to even more grotesque biological levels. It starts off as a fast-acting disease affecting both Sixpack and Bowman, leading to skin conditions and horrible pain before apparent death (although Bowman seeing Sixpack’s rapidly mutating cadaver convinces her to take her own life rather than live through it), but the condition continues after that—it seems to make one’s skin gain a life of its own, melting and reforming and even merging multiple bodies together. This “disease” turns out to be a genetic experiment applied to the unwary crew of the Russian ship in some bizarro attempt to create humans built to live underwater, but instead warps them into a chimaera of multiple oceanic organisms. As we see throughout the movie, severed body parts can grow into new organisms, infected people can grow mouths in their hands, and the still-living faces of human victims are embedded in the flesh of the new monstrosities, the creature essentially growing out of their bodies. There’s a clear debt paid to Alien‘s parasitic life cycle in this monster—although rather than having a monster burst out of someone’s chest, we instead see a giant leech burrow into one—but the way it horrifically blends things together more frequently bring to mind the body-bending transformations of The Thing, or even From Beyond. That’s one of the things that actually gives Leviathan a bit of its own flavour.
For most of the third act, the monster stalks the undersea base in a way where we can only see it in disembodied parts, a claw or a group of tentacles (or one of the mutated crew members’ faces) seen slithering in the rafters above the unaware humans (one of the most blatant rips from Alien)—in a way, that fits the nature of a beast made of many disparate pieces. When the “final form” of the marine mutant does show up, ripping through one of the diving suits in a real “Here’s Johnny!” fashion, it has the face of a grumpy viperfish, which is maybe not as scary as the incomprehensible seafood salad creature that the previous scenes merely hinted at. They wait until the final twenty or so minutes to let this monster loose, but they try to get the most out of it, even if it doesn’t accomplish much other than get its head crushed by an elevator.
Beck, Williams, and Ernie Hudson’s Jones find themselves the final survivors of the crew, abandoned by Tri-Oceanic (who tells them that they can’t send a rescue crew because of a hurricane, which turns out to be a complete lie), and with their escape pods released by Doc, whose last desperate act is an attempt to prevent the mutation from escaping to the surface (they also imply that it gains the knowledge of its human hosts, like in Attack of the Crab Monsters, but this is only really used to justify horror movie cliches like cutting out the lights.) They manage to escape via duty marine lifting bags, which somehow raise them to the surface fast enough (from a depth of 16,000 feet, mind you) that they can eject from their diving suits and break the surface before running out of air. Everything seems to be sunny, except for a series of inconveniences that needlessly extend and complicate the ending: the three having trouble getting the attention of a Coast Guard helicopter, then having trouble losing the attention of some curious sharks…and then a second monster pops up and kills Jones, with Beck using an explosive to finish it off. I don’t think Weller’s final action movie line, “Say ‘ah’, motherfucker!”, was destined to join the pantheon of memorable quotes. All of this happens so rapidly, with Goldsmith’s triumphant score in the background, that it really lets out all the potential tension and becomes ridiculous…and then, for the final moment, Beck meets Foster on board an oil drilling platform, punches her out, and then quips about it.
So, just to recap, after making you think they won’t kill off the sole black actor in the movie, they proceed to do it at the last minute—and our hero, curiously unaffected by his peer’s sudden death, ends the movie by punching a woman in the face. Some helicopter pilots also just saw a fish monster rise out of the ocean, and don’t seem that shocked about it. Very odd way to end a movie!
Leviathan is something that clearly benefits from the ascendance and notoriety of Stan Winston Studios—it’s a standard-issue Sci-Fi creature feature story that has enough big studio backing to get some inventive effects by the top team in the industry alongside above-average direction and casting. It could have easily been a low budget Italian rip-off (especially with the Di Laurentiis family involved), but it’s true nature as a throwback to older cheapies is at least partially concealed by its ability to fake the appearance of a more ambitious movie. Fake ambition is still better than nothing.
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