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

Rotten Tomatoes: 0%/89%

IMDb: 5.3/ 7.6

DeepStar Six screenwriter Lewis Abernathy was telling James Cameron about the "underwater opus" he was writing, Cameron told him he had a similar project, and requested the writer shelve the project to avoid competition. Apparently, they weren't that close.

By the end of the 80s, Hollywood had all but exhausted its search for life on other planets and turned to the ocean floor - equally intangible and full of unknown, potentially hostile species (and, somewhere, Cthulhu). 1989 was the summer of the deep water horror film, and who but Sean S. Cunningham to get in on a money-making trend?

DeepStar Six was his attempt to do to the ocean what he did for summer camp, with a ragtag crew of US Naval Divers coming across an unknown predator. Despite a fairly good setpiece involving a half-eaten deep-sea-diving suit, it was brutalized upon release. And rightly so: save for character actors Miguel Ferer and Matt McCoy, the cast is uniformly bad, the characters act irrationally and the implausibility outweighs the script.

The creature design was initially interesting, from Chris Walas (The Fly, The Fly 2), but later tweaks to its colour made it highly unlikely to be of this earth.

Cameron has proven himself to be a visionary, pioneering new and inventive ways to create a unique atmosphere and look to his films. Storywise, however, when he's not re-fighting the Vietnam war or reshaping Pocahantas for space, he appears at a loss. Even his most major successes have drawn criticism for being derivative, to the point where writer Harlan Ellison had to sue him over The Terminator.

The Abyss was inspired by H.G. Wells' Into The Abyss, the first story to introduce the entire concept of space aliens. Cameron wrote a short story of his own in high school and pulled it out, convincing producer Gale Ann Hurd that it was perfect for his next project.

But though the characters grew since the years he wrote it, the basics were still intact. Visually, it's an experience worthy of iMAX, but the characters are no more well-drawn beyond the kind of stereotype one would indeed envision in their teens. Ed Harris is the gruff oil rig foreman who has gone too deep. Michael Biehn is a fanatical military man whose paranoia surrounding the Soviets lead him to the brink of madness.

We recommend the extended cut, an ambitious look at the cold war's last gasp, with the two warring nations facing each other down, only to be interrupted by the aliens' impatience with our pettiness. We're all of course saved at the last minute by love.

So we begrudgingly side with Cameron. Had he directed DeepStar, at least it would have had flair.