Deep Blue Sea (1999)

The ultimate in summer movie exploitation, this takes the Jaws concept and adds in the usual genetic tinkering to give our toothy adversaries an added advantage: brain-power! The goal was laudable: a cure for Alzheimer's; the side-effect: not good. Samuel L. Jackson plays a rich investor who decides to check out the progress on this work at a remote installation in the middle of the ocean - this is sort of the sharks version of The Day of the Dolphin (73). Anyway, very bad timing. Pretty soon, the crew and scientists are being picked off by a trio of nasty man-eaters which can think their way around our technology. The CGI special FX allow us to see stuff which was not possible a few years earlier. Needless to say, most of the cast are chewed into hamburger and the filmmakers do not spare us the full details of the various dismemberments, but, curiously, the effect is less gross and more in the vein of cartoon-style violence. Perhaps the modern mind instinctively knows that what we're seeing is not really happening, despite the so-so realism of nineties CGI. Then again, CGI tends to be less real and more animation unless it's top notch, and if your DVD player is capable of freeze-frame/slow motion, you may notice the fake cartoony blood inserted digitally in a couple of spots. The strength of the flic is its ability to surprise the viewer, who is probably wise to the ways of this horror genre. Sudden death is given a real meaning here. Of the cast, Thomas Jane, a relative newcomer at the time, did show movie star potential. BoG's Score:7