DeepStar Six (1989): The Scrappiest Contender of the Great ’89 Underwater Horror Rush

“Alien knockoffs” have been around for a long time. Hell, it’s practically its own sub-genre.

Thanks to Roger Corman and other low-budget auteurs, the video store horror section was swarming with titles like Galaxy of Terror, Forbidden World, Inseminoid, The Terror Within, and Creature. But when rumors of a new James Cameron underwater epic started circulating around Hollywood in 1988, execs rushed their own cluster of films about small crews of specialists battling mysterious deep-sea threats.

So in 1989, the “underwater Alien” trend had us swimming in sea monsters for a year.

Why This Scrappy B-Movie Still Delivers:

• No-Nonsense Procedural Tension: Sean S. Cunningham (Friday the 13th) trades grand sci-fi spectacle for drippy, claustrophobic corridors, rising water, and pure B-movie survival grit.
• Genuinely Fun Creature Effects: Instead of CGI, it relies on glorious late-’80s practical effects, squibs, and a massive prehistoric crustacean-like monster lurking in the dark.
• Peak Late-’80s Nostalgia: Captures that tinny, blue-collar aesthetic and cold-war nuclear paranoia better than its shinier, big-budget competitors.

The fact that you can ask a question like, “What’s your favorite underwater monster movie from 1989?” is pretty indicative of how big a splash this trend was. My answer is usually DeepStar Six.

Both DeepStar Six and Leviathan quickly found themselves deep in the shadows of The Abyss‘s record-breaking hype machine. But there’s something about DS6‘s no-nonsense approach that captures the era’s horror sensibilities perfectly. It’s neither a lost classic nor particularly influential in its own right, but it remains a neat artifact of a year when Hollywood took a deep dive.