Deep Undead – review

Director: Dave Castiglione

Release date: 2005

Contains spoilers

This is a budget flick that has had the Blu-Ray treatment by Vinegar Syndrome and has a respectable score on IMDb, which as you watch you wonder why? In some respects I fear being harsh, after all it was early work by inexperienced filmmakers and writer/director Dave Castiglione came up with a concept that became a brave attempt at, evidentially, biting off more than he could chew. On the other hand, it is a blooming difficult watch.

divers

The film begins with a couple of divers looking around a shipwreck. Kudos to this budget production for pulling off underwater sequences but… this is ten minutes of pretty murky footage of divers round a wreck, with no real narrative driving it. One scares the other and then one clutches their head and, at the end of the sequence, they have both died. This cuts into a news report about spills from a drum of radioactive waste produced by a nuclear power station by the lake.

Pamela Sutch as Megan Flowers

The report is by Megan Flowers (Pamela Sutch), a reporter who believes more is going on there. The report mentions that the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) are investigating. Indeed they have arranged for a diving team, led by Kirk Taylor (David Maul) and contracted to the power company, to go into the lake to find the missing divers. The team fails to do so and Taylor has to go in when it appears his team is in trouble. They end up pulling out their diver, Cujo (Vince Butler), but not finding the bodies. There is, they have discovered, radiation round the wreck and Cujo reports seeing an angel who breathed life into him – and has neck punctures they put down to fishing hooks.

Flowers and Ronnie

Flowers tries to get some info but Kirk ain’t talking. Kirk’s girlfriend Ronnie (Dawn Murphy) is going to the beach with her daughters, Kimberley (Caitlin Morgan) and Lisa (Christina Rose), when Flowers approaches them and manages to get Ronnie talking. She leaves them on the beach just before Lisa gets in trouble in the water and yells that something has hold of her and suggests she has been bitten. Ronnie gets into the water to pull her out – Lisa's leg is caught in a fishing net but the body of a diver bobs up also – and Flowers runs back to the beach, only to be grabbed by someone in hazmat gear.

hospital vampire

Meanwhile Kirk loses his contract with the power company, who offer the divers direct employment for ropey sounding work. Cujo becomes ill and the NRC order a purge of water with the divers still in the system. So, we have conspiracy and big business and regulatory bodies acting rogue… but what about vampires. Well, there is one in the wreck (Debbie D, Vampyre Tales & Requiem for a Vampire) who was bitten by another as the ship wrecked in the 1920s and who has, as far as I can tell, been hibernating until the increased heat of the waters (and, I assume the radiation) woke her. Who is the main vampire? I won’t spoil but will say they sound as though they are a separate species to humanity.

plastic fangs

This is a struggle. The narrative isn’t best communicated and scenes drag on. There are logical lapses aplenty also. However, I can’t take away from the fact that there was an ambitious idea here and a budget film using underwater photography was impressive. Other moments are just bizarre – a vampire visiting another in the hospital and the pov over a pair of plastic boobs was just odd. Similarly, Flowers breaking herself and the kids out of a hospital, meeting up with a conveniently parked Kirk (all with a comment about the kids being safer with them) and then taking them out in a rubber dinghy whilst he night dives to the wreck… well their idea of safety isn’t the one I have. I must also mention the line where Kirk describes his wetsuit as having material that shields radiation, hilarious as it is a suit with no arms leaving them exposed, Flowers buys that, at least. Not great but ambitious, 2.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK