20 "Twin" Films That Were In Competition With Each Other

Rotten Tomatoes: N/A/17%

IMDb: 26/.5.8

Any time there's a trend in Hollywood, you can be sure to find Roger Corman sniffing around the debris and recycling bins. Lords of the Deep was Corman's underwater horror film, set in the near future where the ozone layer has been depleted and humans are driven undersea. From there, the plot is fairly identical to the films it was aping - an exploratory vessel has an encounter with an unknown species, species is hostile, add, rinse, repeat.

But Lords of the Deep is lacking, even for a cash-in. Despite being an early credit for director of photography Janusz Kaminski (on the second unit), he was fired for his footage looking "too good", not matching the cheapness of the rest of the production.

So give us Leviathan, George P. Cosmatos' entry into the deep end. Already, we're treated to an impressive cast including Peter Weller, Hector Elizondo, Daniel Stern and Ernie Hudson and a slightly more plausible monster: it's born from a flask of polluted vodka out of a Soviet shipwreck (we said slightly).

Moreover, Cosmatos is just better at handling action scenes, even generating some tension out of a silly B-monster flick. Both tried to ape the likes of James Cameron and Ridley Scott, playing heavily on the working-class hero take on their respective Alien films, but what Leviathan did skillfully and with a knowing sense of camp, DeepStar Six played too straight to be all that much fun.