Off Script: Deep Rising

Films: Deep Rising
Format: DVD from NetFlix on The New Portable.

Every now and then, you come across a movie that you simply can’t explain in any logical way. The year before he made The Mummy, director Stephen Sommers made a movie that for the life of me I cannot fully fathom. I have no idea how he collected this group of actors nor how he made this film a reality. This is one of those films where the main cast is well-known and even most of the bit players are completely recognizable. Even more than wondering how he got this movie made, I wonder how the hell I didn’t know about it.

I don’t even really know how to begin with this. John Finnegan (Treat Williams, the poor man’s Tom Berenger) and his crew Joey (Kevin J. O’Connor) and Leila (Una Damon) have a boat that they hire out to anyone willing to pay. In this case, they are being paid by a group of mercenaries for an unknown project. Joey, who is Finnegan’s mechanic, goes snooping through the mercs’ items and discovers almost a dozen torpedoes. This snooping gets him beaten and creates some tension between the boat crew and the mercenaries.

Wednesday Horror: The Mummy (1999)

Film: The Mummy (1999)
Format: DVD from personal collection on The New Portable.

Brace yourself, folks; I’m going to get effusive here for a few minutes. I really, really like The Mummy from 1999 and I’m not ashamed of who might know it. I like how adorably gorgeous Rachel Weisz is before she got all serious and Oscar-contender-y. I love Brendan Fraser’s Doc Savage-style heroics. I love John Hannah’s smarmy charm and Kevin J. O’Connor’s weasely joy. I love just how much of a badass Arnold Vosloo is and Omid Djalili’s pitch-perfect comic relief. I love the quiet heroism of Oded Fehr and every single curmudgeonly moment of Erick Avari. The Mummy does exactly what it wants to do: it entertains from its opening moments to the close and does it just about as well as you could ever hope. If you haven’t seen this, your life is much less for it.

So yeah, I’ve just put the review up front because I’m not going to beat around the bush here. There are a lot of things I could say about The Mummy and why it shouldn’t be taken that seriously. None of that matters. The highest praise that I can give this movie is almost shocking—it reminds me of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It has the same feel of grand adventure and of supernatural danger. It has the same, wonderful sense of constant adventure and the sort of story that could have easily been serialized in 10-minute segments with a cliffhanger at the end of each one. It would not feel out of place in that sort of environment.