Gods of the Deep is a Lovecraft-inspired film about the discovery of an undersea portal beneath Antarctica and the team of scientists who investigate. Once their dubious sub enters, they discover.. well.. check out the poster art, I guess. It’s big, it’s old, and its unimpressive.

The first ding on this flick is the startlingly cheap set they built for their allegedly high-tech submarine. It’s like you’ve gone back in time to corrugated sets and cardboard. But, I reasoned, they can still make this work if their Big Ideas outweigh their limited design skills.

And for a short period of time, the mystery was engaging… I had hope. Sure, it’s a slapdash of Lovecraftian ideas but I was willing to go with it. But sadly once things go south, it’s all generic madness and noise, poorly paced and edited.

The film hits its lowest point early on when they wake a guy in a goofy rubber suit with underwater bat wings in need of an ironing board. This is when the real problem with the visual effects rears its tentacled heads. Every effects shot was done in isolation… nothing visually interacts and the hokey dialog had to try to explain what’s actually going on.

The acting is pretty mediocre… but who could pull off this nonsensical dialog well? Everyone speaks in non-sequiturs… lines after line of unrelated dialog in between people shouting hand-waving exposition. It’s mostly all nonsense.. time-wasting nonsense.

This film is a no budget mess that may have had people behind it who aspired for something interesting but couldn’t pull it off. I wanted to give it a higher rating for the attempt, but even that was squandered.

Score: 54