Howdy Aliens. How y'all doin'?

Q: Am I going to watch that well known late-eighties “classic” The Abyss?

A: Yes, but I doubt I’ll take it seriously.

There are three main things I remember about this film from many years ago.

1. The bit with the guy having to breathe the weird liquid oxygen so that his lungs wouldn’t collapse under the underwater pressure. “C’mon, you breathed water for nine months of your life, you can do it now....!” Let’s forget the 40 years of your life you didn’t…
2. Mary Elizabeth Manstranowhatsit flashing her boobs on screen. I remember physically reeling from the screen. Of course, it’s all done in the name of realism, she’s having the special electric paddles applied to jumpstart her heart and is currently unconscious. Someone even shouts “I need to have bare skin” before her shirt is ripped open. Just to make the point that it’s strictly necessary and certainly not to keep the attention of any male viewers losing interest with all the hippy style encounters with the strange ‘composed of water’ worm. Funnily enough when I actually do see this bit, it’s not half as horrific as I remember.
3. The worm composed of water. Like an extension of the aliens whilst in the air. Even now, some 17 years later, this special effect is pretty damn good, and the ‘disco lights’ ships are brilliant. It has certainly aged well. I’ll admit to being rather impressed. The alien itself still retains a good deal of annoying schmaltz. Especially the bit where it sadly sniffs at a nuclear weapon. Hauntingly tragic. Blargh. I blame all of this on the saccharine powers of E.T. When you finally get to see the aliens and their weird janky bald glowing heads, it’s a bit of a let down after all the CGI excitement. Also I can’t help but notice, during the ‘oxygenated liquid’ scenes, Ed Harris continually has air bubbles popping from his nostrils. They can create a tube made from water and have it move around, but not conceal a few nostril bubbles? Ah, the vagaries of SFX.

I’m watching the opening and I can’t believe I don’t remember the hilarious guy with the ‘tache. Or that one of them has a rat. The unfortunate rodent serves to be the first tester of the liquid oxygen stuff. It would appear that even James Cameron is unable to get away with putting the rat underwater on screen. I wonder where he got that handy rat-sized cage…?

Huh. Have just found this:

“The film was censored by the American Humane Association for a scene in which a rat is held "underwater": actually, in an oxygenated fluorocarbon liquid used in fluid breathing systems. Five rats were used in the film. The rats were unharmed and one became Cameron's pet, but died of natural causes before the film opened. In England this scene was still replaced with a scene where what happens to the rat is verbally described by the characters, because the Royal Veterinarian thought the experience was painful for the rat.” (www.wikipedia.org)

(Natural causes, huh?) Only in England. We just love rats. You’re only ever six feet away from one in London, I’m told. Poison them with weird chemicals, trap and maim them, but GOOD GOD! Don’t put them underwater in an oxygenated flurocarbon liquid. That’s just plain inhumane.

To keep us entertained, let’s play a little ‘Spot the Stiff’…

Death candidate one: Guy with ‘tache. He’s currently coming down with some kind of compression induced madness and in charge of an underwater vehicle. He dies unpleasantly by drowning whilst screaming and visible through a small porthole in a door. A fitting end. Oh hang on, that was some other moustachioed man. How long have there been two of them? Our whiskery friend is now sweating profusely, twitchy and in charge of a nuclear missile. “We can’t trust them, we’re gonna have to take steps.” He’s now watching everyone else on little video screens and becoming immensely paranoid. Sweating and twitching at an all time high. Then at the watery worm’s first appearance, he slams a door on it. A sure sign of impending doom. Never attack the beast! Now he’s taken over the sub and is ‘about to make war with an alien species!!’ Wooo. I think I love him. He finally meets his explosive end, (or should I say implosive…) with gurning aplenty during an exciting submarine battle. His sub implodes while he does some enraged shouting. Apparently rage is the new black for men with moustaches.

Death candidate two: Woman in the farmer’s hat and dungarees. She just seems rather extraneous to the main plot. Her submarine is hit by a descending ‘crane’. But she remarkably survives. Possibly to die horribly later on. Probably in a heroic fashion. To my ongoing amazement she makes it all the way to the ‘group laugh’ scene at the end. Tsk. I used to rule at this game. I must be losing my touch.

Still despite the happy-clappy ‘close encounters of the third kind’ type aliens, there is some truly terrifying underwater stuff with people going mad inside their suits and loads of heavy breathing and panicking and what have you. As a bit of a claustrophobe, there’s nothing that looks more unpleasant than running out of air deep underwater…Well. I think I can cross submarine travel off my ‘to do’ list.