In Hollywood, 1989 was the year of the sea monster film. Following James Cameron’s triumph with ‘The Abyss,’ other filmmakers got on board with aquatic creatures and astounding visual effects. ‘Leviathan,’ directed by George P. Cosmatos, followed suit and unabashedly drew inspiration from ‘Alien’ and ‘The Thing.’ ‘Leviathan’ is created by replacing the creature from ‘Alien’ with the monster from ‘The Thing’ and setting it underwater.
It is a minor horror classic and an ambitious B-movie monster movie in its own right. ‘Leviathan’ keeps up better or on par with the creature features from the 1980s more than thirty years after its premiere. It tells the story of a group of underwater miners who are stricken with a gene-altering sickness that causes them to morph into horrific mutant creatures.
Stan Winston’s creature effects for the mutations were both obnoxious and practical. Despite the fact that the creature is barely visible throughout the film, its presence dominates the plot. Today, we will look into the origins and characteristics of the terrible mutant creature from the B-movie horror film.
Leviathan (1989)
The Tri-Oceanic Corp sends a group of undersea miners on a 90-day mission at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to extract Silver and other metals. The nature of the mission was extremely hazardous but there was a greater danger lurking in the corner. Miss Martin was supervising the team from the land and she sent Stephen Beck, a geologist to assist the team with their operations. Dr. Glen was in charge of the research and wellbeing of the crew.
Meanwhile, Sixpack was the troublemaker who was busy lusting after the female crew members. The crew consisted of eight members including Willie, Justin, Tony, Bridget, and G.P. Cobb. With only three days remaining for the mission, the crew left for their routine drilling.
The crew started to panic after losing connection with Sixpack, as he tripped and disappeared inside a wrecked cargo ship. Doc identified the word Leviathan written in Russian on the ship. On checking the records of the same, the crew discovers that it shows that the ship is on active duty in the Baltic Sea and assumes it’s a mistake.
While the crew was frantically searching for Sixpack, he had ventured into the ruins in search of drowned treasure. They return to the base with a safe and uncover records left behind by the Russian crew.
They find a video recording of the captain, records of the deceased crew members, and a bottle of vodka. Sixpack had sneaked a flask of alcohol away from the chest and hidden it from the others. Later, he shared his stock with Bowman after Beck hid the vodka found in the treasure.
Doc along with Beck review the video log left behind by the Russian Captain and find the messages about the crew’s deteriorating health to be cryptic. He talks about a plague infecting the crew, and something weird happening in the ship before the video ends abruptly. While looking through the footage of William’s camera, they noticed a large hole in the hull. It was possibly created after getting hit by a torpedo.
The next morning, Sixpack woke up feeling sick. He felt cold and lesions appeared throughout his back. Doc collected his samples for biopsy, as he had not seen anything like this before. When the computer failed to identify the specimen, the doctor asked the machine to guess what it could be.
To this, the machine replied with ‘Genetic Alteration’. Sixpack died hours after his symptoms appeared. Beck and the Doctor decide to hide the news of his death from the crew for the time being. Doc examines the rest of the crew for possible symptoms but gets called for a conference with Ms. Martin before getting the chance to examine Bowman. Bowman had begun experiencing symptoms similar to Sixpack while Beck and the Doctor were in a conference with Ms. Martin.
They had requested an emergency medical evacuation as per protocol, but Ms. Martin was reluctant to pull the team back before the scheduled time. She made up an excuse about a severe storm on the surface, stating it as the reason for the delay in the rescue operation.
Meanwhile, Bowman had become scared about her condition as she began to lose hair. Unaware of Sixpack’s death, she comes across his corpse and assumes that he was sleeping. She talks to him about their condition, as his body begins to mutate under the covers. She freaks out after seeing his wrists transform into a disgusting shape. Scared, she kills herself to avoid the same fate.
As Doc took her corpse to the sick bay, the crew noticed Sixpack continuing to mutate into an unknown creature. The mutation absorbs Bowman and continues to grow on its own. Doc and Beck decided to flush their bodies into the water, but some crew members believed that there was hope for their colleagues as their bodies continued to move inside the body bag. But they change their opinions after the creature forming inside the bag claws and attacks Cobb. They dispose of the body, but a leg gets left on board and continues to move.
The surviving members learn of what happened to Sixpack and Bowman and comprehend the real mission of the Leviathan. The ship was secretly experimenting on the crew members with mutagens, to mutate them into clones of undersea creatures. They had tainted the vodka with mutagen cells that ended up making the crew members sick like Sixpack and Bowman.
But the Russians sank the ship once the experiment went out of hand. The mutating leg had now evolved into a leech-like creature and attacked Dejesus in the kitchen. The creature started to grow tentacles after assimilating with his latest victim and began attacking the crew randomly.
The injuries caused Cobb to mutate as well, who went on to infect Doc. The surviving crew learns that the creature is attracted to blood and needs it to grow. Along with the bodies of the victims, it also absorbs their intelligence. ‘Leviathan’ will always be compared to ‘The Abyss’, and ‘Deepstar six’, as they all came out in the same year. More than three whole decades since its release, Leviathan has aged as one of the most effective underwater creature horrors.
A secret Russian mission that went wrong, body horror filled with gore, characters with distinctive personalities, and a mysterious creature that infects and kills most of the crew, Leviathan has them all. Back in the day, the critics had treated the film harshly and labeled it as a rip-off of ‘Alien’ and ‘The Thing’. Despite unapologetically borrowing from those, ‘Leviathan’ has unique traits of its own. All the films revolve around an abandoned or isolated group of people being terrorized by an unknown creature, but all of them have separate settings and characters.
It follows in the footsteps of a typical survivor horror movie where the sleaziest guy gets killed first, and a necessary shower scene. Despite having a gigantic and constantly evolving creature, the greater evil in the film is the corporate organization that chooses profit over rescuing their crew in their time of need.
Homo Aquaticus: Creature from Leviathan – Explored
The Russians were conducting secret experiments in the sea, to evolve humans as aquatic creatures who are adaptable and resilient to life underwater. When the experiment proved to be too dangerous and out of control, they sank the ship to hide their experiments from the world. They had laced the alcohol with mutating agents to drug the unsuspecting crew and transform them into mutants.
Later, the alcohol was uncovered by Sixpack, and he couldn’t resist taking a sip from the flask. The mutation started with him feeling extremely cold and his skin starting to transform. Initially, Doc had labeled it as a really bad hangover but the mysterious marks appearing on his back had Doc concerned.
Even the skin sample from Sixpack turned out to be a dead-end, and the only possible reason for his sudden sickness was Genetic Alteration. Moments later he lost his pulse. Doc and Beck had assumed that he was dead but he was mutating into an aquatic creature and his genetics were being altered.
Justin had a conversation with Sixpack’s corpse, assuming that he was sleeping after seeing his foot move under the covers. Meanwhile, Bowman had started to show similar symptoms and she continued to grow sick and scared. The mysterious skin rash began appearing on her neck.
She turned hysterical and killed herself after weird goo started coming out of Sixpack’s wrist. Doc and Beck find Sixpack’s body evolving into a hideous slimy creature, that had bloated and expanded since he lost his pulse. He was being reborn as Homo Aquaticus. It had grown and assimilated Bowman’s corpse into itself and had turned into one giant organism.
Unaware of their deceased colleagues’ mutation, Dejesus was reluctant to dispose of their corpse believing that they were still alive inside the bag. But they immediately change their minds after the creature tries to scrape itself out of the bag and claws Cobb with its tentacle-like limbs.
Sixpack’s mutated leg continued to float inside the ship, while the rest of their body had been disposed of underwater. Doc examined the footage of the bones of the deceased crew members on the Russian ship next, and noticed that their skulls appeared to be bigger than that of usual humans.
The Doc realized that the Russians were researching ways for humans to evolve into creatures who could survive underwater with minimal difficulties. The mutated severed leg on the ship started to regenerate. The head emerging out of the leg looked like a fish-snake hybrid. It lurked in the drains before it lurked around the kitchen shelf and jumped inside Dejesus’ body.
Beck, Jones, and Willie had armed up with flamethrowers, flares, and cutters to defend themselves against the creature, but it was strong enough to crawl out of a metal door. It slithered around the ship like a snake and sneaked up on its prey in unsuspecting moments. It went on to absorb the bodies of the other victims into itself, and their heads could be seen under the surface of its skin.
Even after being cut off from the main body, the decapitated parts had a life of their own. It could infect others by puncturing their skin. The creature is attracted to blood and needs it as a source to grow. As the creature was constantly evolving, it started to absorb the intelligence of the victims it absorbed and became cunning enough to cut off the air supply to the base.
While regenerating, the creature takes on the form of a reptile and attacks one of the crew members by jumping inside his body. There’s a possibility of the existence of multiple Homo Aquaticus’ under the sea, given their ability to regenerate even after getting mutilated, but it needs blood to survive. Beck had decided to set up a trap for the Dracula-like creature using blood.
His plan was to lure in the creature and dispose of it by flushing it in the ocean but the original plans rarely work out in movies without an unexpected disaster. Cobb began showing symptoms of the Genetic Alteration and got to Doc. It seemed to have evolved into a crocodile-like reptilian creature that kept crawling through the ship.
While underwater, the presence of the monster was felt without it making a full appearance. When the three survivors decide to suit up and float to the top of the ocean, the creature follows them.
Just as the survivors thought they had escaped the monster, a shark started to swim towards them. Moments before getting rescued by a helicopter, the monster emerged to the surface and killed Jonas by sinking him. The creature looked part human, part fish, and part dinosaur.
Stan Watson had turned down working on ‘The Abyss’ to create the practical visual effects for this film. In the end, Beck defeats the monster by feeding it an explosive, but given the creature’s ability to regenerate, it’s only a matter of time before the creature resurfaces.
The Thing vs. Homo Aquaticus (Leviathan)
The monster’s ability to absorb the bodies of its victims was similar to that of the ability of the creature from ‘The Thing’ to assimilate its prey. If the creature from ‘The Thing’ and the Homo Aquaticus were pitted against each other, it would be a tough fight but ‘The Thing’ might have a better chance at victory.
The Homo Aquaticus hasn’t displayed the ability to disguise itself as one of its prey and coming out of a water body might be a disadvantage. The ability to disguise itself would allow ‘The Thing’ to have the element of surprise. It also does have the experience and knowledge of an ancient being, while the Homo Aquaticus was a recent science experiment gone wrong. Even when the creatures are at their weakest, The Thing will have the advantage of superior intelligence while Homo Aquaticus only has the intelligence of those he has absorbed.
But its ability to regenerate and constantly evolve might come in handy while fighting with the Thing. Nonetheless, if the two creatures were to assimilate into each other, it would give Homo Aquaticus the ability to disguise itself as its human prey and use this as bait to kill others.
Why you should watch Leviathan?
While James Cameron chose the realistic route for ‘Abyss’ by filming inside an unfinished nuclear reactor pit with 7 million gallons of water, George P. Cosmatos stuck to the old school method. Leviathan was shot underwater by slowing down the cameras and visually it was just as effective as Cameron’s film.
The film received unnecessary negative reviews from critics who deemed the story unoriginal, and for also having little or no depth to the characters. We believe that the characters had enough depth as required by the plot. Adding more dimensions and backstories to the characters wouldn’t have served the story but would rather slow down the pacing of the film.
When it comes to survivor movies centered on creature horror, the creature, and its abilities are more important than the depth of the human characters. When the question of survival arises, it doesn’t matter what trauma drove the character to play the hero. All you need to do is hope that they survive and wish they’ll find a way to kill the monster. And the ending is even better when the monster doesn’t die.
‘Leviathan’ had its priorities set right and they gave the creature the exact amount of attention it required. It provided a plausible explanation for the origin of the creature; making it the result of a Russian conspiracy.
It has all the elements of a cheeky 80s creature horror film that made it so entertaining to watch. The gore element of the creature was gooey enough to make you uneasy, yet it was not over the top. The cast was filled with renowned actors like Peter Weller from Robocop, Daniel Stern from Home Alone, Ernie Hudson from Ghostbusters, Richard Crenna from First Blood, Meg Foster and Amanda Pays.
It was Ernie Hudson’s character who stole the show, with his calm approach and rational decisions. Undoubtedly, he was one of the smartest members of the crew. Upon its release, the movie didn’t get the applause it deserved but over the years ‘Leviathan’ has gained popularity as a cult classic. Out of all the underwater creature films from that era, this one has aged the best.