Friday, August 08, 2014

Movie review - "The Deep" (1977) **

This was one of the first movies I ever saw at the drive in, and I have strong memories of visual images from it: scuba divers lurking around underwater wrecks, moray eels chomping on people black men scaring white people, people getting air in air pockets.

Looking at it over 30 years later and that's pretty much all the movie is. Jacqueline Bisset and Nick Nolte are the tourists who stumble upon and old wreck that contains morphine and treasure.

Bisset looks splendid in those opening sequences where she scuba dives without a bra - a poster of this helped the movie make a fortune. But while at first she's part of the action, doing the diving, once Robert Shaw becomes involved it's more of a boys own adventure with Nolte and Shaw going underwater and Bissett being tormented on dry land. She does get to spear one guy and discover a key clue by identifying an old parchment as a female's shopping list.

I think Nolte and Bisset's relationship is meant to be more interesting than it comes across - there's all this allusion to their backstory. But really they just look like two good looking people with money. Robert Shaw adds some crusty gravitas (he was in an awful lot of 70s action films, wasn't he?), and Lou Gossett Jnr has charisma as the baddy and a good death scene... even if it is a bit yuck that all the goodies are white and the baddies black.

Stunning locations, the novelty of a cricket game, a decent amount of adventure.

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