Leviathan (1989):

I ended 2011 with a great cinema movie (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), but ended it with a bad one on DVD when I bought Leviathan.
I missed this dubious cinematic gem upon it’s initial release in 1989 and I thank God I hadn’t forked out the price of a cinema ticket. Nothing worse than having handed over money at the box office, to sit there during the screening for maybe an hour (less in this case – a lot less!) and think: Damn! This movie is truly crap!
I was buying up some used books and DVDs at one of the charity stores. During my rummage, I found a few good ones to either add to my collection, or sell on.
Then suddenly I found this movie. I looked at the cover, read the blurb on the back, looked at the few still shots … thought about it … tried to remember if anyone else had ever discussed it and gave it a thumbs up, or down … couldn’t remember anyone even mentioning it (which should have been a warning) … and then I thought: why not?
So I bought it, helped the charity along a little more, took it home, and then wasted about 90 minutes of my life watching it.
For those who haven’t seen it … stop me when this sounds familiar:
The crew of Shack 7 are an ocean bed mining operation on a 90 day shift cycle.
The Abyss, or Outland anyone?
They discover a sunken shipwreck, the Leviathan of the title, wherein one of the crew retrieves the safe in the hope of claiming a fortune in lost treasure, but instead unleashes a parasitic organism … sounds feasible!
Alien, or John Carpenter’s The Thing anyone?
Even the noises of the computers sound exactly like those of Blade Runner and Alien.
The biggest rip-off is the scene that will have all viewers pointing at the screen and protesting that they saw that done in Jaws!
Oh, dear … I watched this movie … I still can’t believe I watched it … I will never sit through it again.
What good came of me watching Leviathan? What was the only positive thing I could take from the experience? Buying it was a donation to charity. The next time I visited the charity store, I gave it back as a donation again so they could make twice their money as a resale.
It still made me wonder why so many movies rip off classics … and do it so badly!