Leviathan (1989)

One of the deep water thrillers released in the same year as Cameron's The Abyss and Deepstar Six, about some kind of underwater threat.  The title refers to  a sunken Russian ship. The beleaguered crew here are a group of undersea miners - Peter Weller (fresh off Robocop) plays the lead and the guy in charge, Beck; Richard Crenna plays the doc; others include Amanda Pays, Hector Elizondo, Ernie Hudson, Daniel Stern and Lisa Eilbacher. Also in the cast is the creepy Meg Foster as the CEO of the corporation; she's not on-site and is safe above the waters the whole film. Stern's character, the resident joker, is the one who picks up a vodka bottle from the Russian ship; if I got this right, he gets infected - he gets sick fast and dies, but more than that, his dead body soon mutates due to the alien organism inside him. I say it's alien but I don't know - it's some sort of genetic freakism. This organism grows fast; another female crew member thinks she's also infected and commits suicide; her body merges with her dead crewmate.
Some  of this is very clumsy, whether due to cut scenes or just carelessness (this was an early directing job for George P. Cosmatos). For example, Beck & the doc find the two dead crew members merged with the monster; the scene cuts abruptly to all the crew carrying the remains in a plastic bag. There's no transitional scene - what did Beck & the doc tell the rest of the crew? I guess, not much; the crew think the two dead crewmates are still alive and open the bag, unleashing the monster. But, how did Beck and the doc get the monster into the bag to begin with? I have no idea. As common with these sorts of films, the crew get picked off one-by-one, but this film is a sample of what  I call the slow death scenario; the monster doesn't just swiftly kill humans; humans get infected and merge with the creature and it's unclear if the victims are still alive. Considering their fate, they are better off dead, but I don't think they are. It's pretty gross and a bit disturbing, but the action scenes aren't too exciting. Much of this seems to try very hard to copy Alien (79) & The Thing, the '82 version. BoG's Score: 5.5 out of 10