Hooptober... And Then There Were Nine

7th Kill

OK listen up, we have a situation here. Yet another outstanding genre movie languishing with a Letterboxd rating in the mid-2's. The Superdeep is fucking AWESOME, guys! What the hell is wrong with you? :D

I was really keen to see this and get a dose of that deep-sea aquatic horror syrup that has been so hard to get hold of since 1989. Well, turns out this is not an aquatic horror themed movie at all. But, it is a subterraenean horror film with terrifying beasties (kinda - maybe beasties is the wrong word). And it's beautifully made, professionally shot, gorgeously designed... I'm sorry, I just don't understand how this doesn't seem to have found an appreciative audience - especially in its home on Shudder, which should theoretically filter out all the uptight horror-hating crowd who inexplicably still watch horror movies and then dump shit all over them (yeah, I'm talking about Netflix).

Let's talk about mould. Mould is really fucking gross and it has always freaked me out (although at least I can keep it together better than my wife, who runs screaming out of the kitchen every time she opens up a jar of pasta sauce only to find a little velvety grey merkin floating on the top of the contents). So, this movie is about killer mould, basically - I don't think that's a spoiler, because I am not going to go into detail about where this takes that basic idea. It's funny that this is set in a Soviet deep-drill operation, because the early scenes of this film reminded me of a classic early episode of The X-Files where Muldy and Sculler get trapped on a Russian sea-hulk and people start getting infected with this killer fungus that grows inside you and then erupts in a huge spear out through your mouth when it's ready to spore. If you think that basic concept sounds horrific, let me tell you, it's pretty tame in comparison to how this stuff behaves in The Superdeep.

At two hours, it's a little overlong, but just to be clear, I think it's the first half which could have been edited down a little more economically. It's a little slow to get going, but that second hour just escalates and escalates - and everything about the film gets better too: the performances, the music, the character intrigue, and of course the "monster". Man, I so want to describe it, but this movie is underseen so I'm not going to (even my slightly spoilerific Best Kill below isn't going to give too much away). More people should check this one out!

Best Kill (may contain traces of spoiler)

OK, remember that scene in Annihilation where they find the remnants of that human body in the empty pool, and there's a horrifying efflorescence of some kind of fungus spreading up the wall, with traces of the guy's skull in it? I do wonder if that bit of art design directly influenced this moment in the film, where a character who has been infected with the fungus meets their doom. Because what we see could be a graphic presentation of what happened to that guy in the pool. There's body parts melting into the floor, there's exposed internal organs, there's huge throbbing blisters and then a horrific climax of fungal dispersion. Things get more grotesque after this scene, but this is where the movie fully got hold of my throat and dragged me into the rest of the film.