The Deep

PëRMBLEDHJE

Jacqueline Bisset in a wet T-shirt, Donna Summer's title disco hit and Jaws author Peter Benchley co-scripting from his own novel were enough to make this soggy saga a major box-office hit in the summer of 1977. With 40 per cent of his action taking place underwater in creepy depths, director Peter Yates doesn't have to do much to keep tension on an even keel, and the mean moray eel sequence is a real shocker when it arrives. But slick photography aside, the silly script about rival divers searching for shipwrecked drugs and two-dimensional characterisations from Nick Nolte, Robert Shaw and Louis Gossett succeed in sinking plausibility every time anything resembling reality threatens to surface.