Review: The Rift (1990)

Directed by: Juan Piquer Simón
Starring: R. Lee Ermey, Ray Wise, Jack Scalia
Written by: Juan Piquer Simón, Mark Klein, David Coleman
Music by: Joel Goldsmith
Country: United States, Spain
Available on: DVD (Kino Lorber)
IMDb

The Rift (1990) basically cements that Juan Piquer Simón is one of my favorite low-budget horror directors. This is essentially a cheesy hybrid of Alien and Leviathan, about the crew of a deep sea submarine sent to check on the disappearance of another deep sea submarine and find lots of mutated creatures instead. The movie is gloriously littered with bad accents, bad acting, and plentifully fun gore and creature effects. Simón, as usual, eschews any kind of sensical story in favor of plot non-sequiturs and practical effects galore. The cast actually features some relative heavyweights like R. Lee Ermey and Ray Wise, but they’re both kind of sleepwalking through the movie. The characters are the usual motley crew of military meatheads, including the strict, task-master captain (Ermey, of course) and the hotheaded rebel (played by Jack Scalia with the fluffiest mullet I’ve seen since Martin Riggs). There’s a lot of military and scientific mumbo-jumbo in the dialog, which can get tedious, but the real appeal here is in the B-horror guts. There are a lot of tentacles, teeth, exploding heads, wet transformations, etc., and it’s worth watching for all that. Oh, and for the climactic old man battle between Ermey and Wise. Hard to go wrong here if you like underwater horror and have some tolerance for schlock.

Rating: 7 out of 10