User reviews

1 October 2002. Dark Descent has many similarities to Outland (1981), a space western, starring Sean Connery. Unfortunately, Dark Descent doesn't really have much original going for it and, in fact, does a worse job. Outland by contrast had a tight script, good use of interaction and tension with its characters. As a ripoff, Dark Descent descends rather than promotes what Outland has already accomplished.

After midnight, having a bout of insomnia, I see Dean Cain in a Outland knockoff that only lacks the production values, plot, visual effects and acting.

Basically, a very bad "Outland" under water. The concept has some merit. Instead of vacuum, think extreme pressure and its related dangers. Of course, because of the obvious low budget, they couldn't really develop along those lines. Dean Cain does what he can with what he has. Regarding production values, I think there was one visual effect that was interesting.

Typically, I really enjoy campy, grade-B (or less) sci-fi thrillers but I just couldn't do this time. Watch a DVD you have watched more than 15 times, do some laundry, read a book, read a comic book, read a Judith Krantz novel before fall into the trap that is "Dark Descent".

...when it was called "Outland." Both of which are, as another commenter said, based on "High Noon." Some of the shots are almost identical to the Connery movie, as are the basic scenario and subplot elements. Additionally, some of the plot details they changed, presumably to avoid lawsuits, created huge, unresolved plot holes. And of course Dean Cain can't hold a candle to Connery at his post-Bond peak.

As if those failings were not egregious enough, this movie also lacks the cranky charm of Frances Sternhagen.

Rend "Outland" and sink this flick in the Marianas Trench.

For some reason, I got the wrong conception that is film was really going to be an under water thriller and not turn into a complete Merry-go-round of people running from one place to another and shooting up the place like an old time Western. Dean Cain(Will Murdock), played a plastic cop who tried to keep law and order as a Marshall and tried to obtain help among the crew, and what do you think happened? All I can say about this film is that Dean Cain did his very best to keep this film together. However, there was a brief scene where a gal grinds herself up and down a pole for the men's enjoyment and that was probably a HIGH LIGHT to the film. Avoid, if you want to!

As others have mentioned, this movie is a blatant rip-off of "Outland" - which itself was a rip-off of "High Noon". Still, this could have provided some decent exploitation entertainment. But except for a somewhat cool sequence involving someone getting hit by water, there is absolutely NOTHING fun or even momentarily distracting in this particular telling of the story. Low production values hurt, but there is also no sense of fun, no zip, no energy here. Not even worth seeing for free when it comes on cable.

This movie marks the return to that 80's scifi set look we all love and don't miss. At all. Although this is obviously a TV-quality movie I doubt it's possible to make a futuristic indoor movie any cheaper than this with it's few grey walled sets and a few meters of corridor which one soon comes to recognize. Although the movie is dreary and just plain silly, this is not it's major fault. You soon find yourself wondering how blatant a ripoff you can get away with when the plot, clothes and scenes are taken from the 80ies movie "Outland" with Sean Connery.

Save yourself the time and money and rent something (anything) else.

It was like the writers of this movie found out they had Dean Cain cast and said "Well bugger that then, I think we can get by without a storyline". With so little plot you would think it would be easy to make it coherent and yet there were still holes. Cain is forced to carry the whole movie and while his performance isn't that bad his character lacks any depth and consequently is entirely uninteresting to watch. Low production value shines through as you watch bullets fly off what is obviously plastic tubing. If you like watching people walk people walk around and around in circles, this movie is for you, otherwise don't bother.

Here's some advice for aspiring filmmakers: the total lack of a budget does not doom you to not making movies, but it does prevent you from making movies that demand good production values. Case in point is Descent, set in an underwater mining colony. Unfortunately, the real set is a bunch of Star Trek inspired sci-fi hallways. The story (what story there is) could have taken place at your public school. Another note to filmmakers: if your story sucks, the set's got to look good! Bottom line: avoid this sorry excuse for sci-fi and rent The Abyss instead.

How is it possible that a producer from series like Carnivale and Spartacus: Blood and Sand has made such a bad flick. Daniel Knauf should have known better, maybe he did because this was his first and last attempt to make a full feature.

The budget must have been very low because when they are running through the corridors you can easily see that they ran in circles. But by editing they tried to avoid that feeling. The CGI used is one of the SyFy style, so really bad. When they are hiding in a room full of rocks , they really looked like Styrofoam, made me think of the flick APE.

On the other hand the bad guys were, sigh, Russians with bad , sigh, teeth. So cliché. There's too much of talking and the shooting at the last reel of the flick is boring too, it takes too long. There's one body that's been slashed in two by an automatic door, done CGI. I never got into the characters and the acting was mediocre. Sad but true, indeed a dark descent.

Gore 0,5/5 Nudity 0,5/5 Effects 1/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5

This movie marks the return to that 80's scifi set look we all love and don't miss. At all. Although this is obviously a TV-quality movie I doubt it's possible to make a futuristic indoor movie any cheaper than this with it's few grey walled sets and a few meters of corridor which one soon comes to recognize. Although the movie is dreary and just plain silly, this is not it's major fault. You soon find yourself wondering how blatant a ripoff you can get away with when the plot, clothes and scenes are taken from the 80ies movie "Outland" with Sean Connery.

Save yourself the time and money and rent something (anything) else.

The plot is so slow as to be nearly non-existant. The acting isn't corny-bad; it's just bad. The special effects were not fun or funny; they were just terrible. The set is all gray. The digital quality is so low that many bland screens just look like large pixillated stripes of differing grays. The music is dull. Honestly, I do enjoy a lot of different low-budget movies, but there's just nothing that makes this one worth watching.

Listen, if you're looking for Academy-Award consideration, go away! The deal with this film is this: it's entertaining, and fun, and the cast is fun to watch. If you're awake at 2am, and you've got nothing else happening, it's mindless entertainment and fun to watch. If anyone tries to go any deeper than that, you're an idiot. View this movie for what it is... mindless entertainment, and enjoy! Some films are made for a small budget, but the message and the story is clear... this one is a can't miss... Dean Cain "Out of Time" is always great to watch, and Hristo Shopov is as solid as he was in "Passion of the Christ." Enjoy!!

Dark Descent is basically an underwater version of the 1981's Sean Connery lead sci-fi thriller OUTLAND that is set in space. Outland is excellent & my favourite Connery film by far, also it was directed by cult movie director Peter Hyams, so all good in my opinion.

2002's low-budget B-movie version of Outland has taken a very similar story, but not a total copy, & set it at the bottom of the Ocean in a claustrophobic mining base where the workers are going crazy & killing themselves & other's.

In the officer of law role, just like Sean Connery, is the nearly always likeable Dean Cain (Dragon Fighter, BOA, Superman 90's series) as the good guy & Marshall of the underwater base. Dean plays a good part & is very likeable & actually creates a character you want to survive.

Dean Cain never made it "Big" as in a Blockbuster action star & it's a shame because he's really good & very likeable & better than most of todays leading men action stars!!! Cain made a full career as a B-movie actor & that's fine, he's been around for ages & had stocked up the video rental shelves of Blockbuster for years back in the good old days. Although Cain is a direct-to-video actor that doesn't mean he's not good, because he is good on screen & i like him in Dark Descent best.

I love B-movies & especially sci-fi ones made on small budgets but with a good heart & story behind it & that's what this has. The fx are cheap early 2000's CGI (adds to it's early 2000's charm) for the underwater & sci-fi stuff, such as the underwater futuristic compound base, but the rest of it inside the interiors is very well done & looks really cool. Dark Descent is a sci-fi mystery thriller with bursts of action sprinkled throughout, but i like its chill vibe & watching Dean wondering around the corridors of the big compound. A very good B-movie in my opinion anyway.

There's a level of suspense as Dean's Anxiety fueled Marshall Will Murdock is trying to investigate these bizarre suicidal deaths as well as having a bunch of thugs on their way to murder him for revenge for a previous matter (you'll see in the beginning of the film) & the setting is claustrophobic & has a dark sci-fi look to it.

Also stars Scott Wiper (A Better Way To Die) as Murdocks wimpy partner Niles.

I totally dig Dark Descent as it's such a fun late-night movie with a great lead in Dean Cain as a very likeable character with his Will Murdock.

In a deep sea mining complex, a Federal Marshal (Dean Cain) tries to find out why miners are committing suicide ast such an alarming rate. Needless to say, there are corporate maneuvers being played as the company that owns the facility dispatches a team of hit men to kill him.

This is by far the worst offering that UFO(the production company) has released and it is nearly a blatant rip-off of HIGH NOON and even for that matter the far superior OUTLAND (High Noon in space).

Warning...if you see this on the shelf, pass it by and pick up either of the two aforementioned films...that will be a rental fee well spent!

This might be one of the better made-in-Bulgaria futuristic undersea outnumbered-marshal High Noon tributes starring Dean Cain that I have seen.

Most people that have some regard for sci-fi will have seen the classic Outworld with Sean Connery. This is basically a made for TV (or so it seemed) rip off. It certainly no classic and unfortunately does not have the charm of the original space based version. That said.. It does have it's tense moments and some well executed special effect and action shots. Don't expect too much as the budget obviously wasn't a record breaker, but it does well with what it has.

Dean Cain is well, Dean Cain and you do spend the first five minutes of the film (as you do a lot of his other TV work) waiting for him to rip open his shirt to reveal the Superman logo. But that's our problem!

If your bored and there's nothing else on the TV, grab a beer and give this a go

I thought Dark Descent was going to be a sea monster movie but it turned out to be an underwater high noon. I say this because the story was nearly identical and and lot of the lines were aswell. Dean Cain was good as usual and the movie was ok. If I wanted to see High Noon again I would have rented it!

I agree with the previous reviewer that this movie is a remake of Outland - which was a remake of High Noon. These overseas, low-budget films are usually not very substantial but are watchable. I thought Dean Cain did a good job with the roll but, I must admit, I usually find him entertaining. Some of the other actors did credible work in this film: Scott Wiper, Art Mendelson, and Valentin Ganev as the doctor. But beyond the movie itself, this was Dan Knauf's first attempt at directing and I think he did a fine job with a limited budget. Remember, Knauf is the creator of the Emmy award winning HBO series, Carnivale, and you can see the genius at work here. With that in mind, I think this film reaches beyond the low budget feature it is and gives us a glimpse of the dark imagination of Knauf. Watchable for that reason alone.

While a cool, prolific budget-conscious studio shingle adept at filling video shelf space and cable television programming slots, Phillip J. Roth's Bulgarian-based UFO (Unified Film Organization) is no French-based StudioCanal; it's apples to oranges. So, yeah, John Carpenter had every right to sue -- and win -- a claim against the studio's Lockout (2012) by Luc Beeson, as it blatantly clipped Escape from New York. But seriously, what's Warner Brothers/Columbia Studios to gain by suing UFO for this familiar we've-seen-it-all-before sci-fi romp?

Chances are you've seen, but may not know it, the work of Phillip J. Roth, the writer behind this film originally known as Dark Descent during its Euro-overseas theatrical run. Born in the US, Roth's direct-to-video/cable career stretches back to the early '80s with the US-aired sci-fi-actioners Prototype X29A and APEX (both takes on The Terminator), Digital Man (Universal Solider), Total Reality (Total Recall), Velocity Trap (Demolition Man), and Interceptor Force (French-bred action star Oliver Gruner). Sure, while you can say most entries on Roth's resume are influenced by or homages popular films, there's no denying 2016's Arrival starring Amy Adams so-ripped Roth's own 2001 cable-aired Epoch (right down the floating stone monolith space-spires). Most recently, you've seen quite a few of Roth's sequel-productions in the Boogeymen, Death Race, Doom, Jarhead, Lake Placid, The Messengers, Sniper, Taken, Wrong Turn, and SyFy's monster-shark franchises. One of his most recent offerings was Inferno: Skyscraper Escape with British actress Claire Forani, kickin' high rise ass, The Rock-style (appeared on US streaming shores in 2020; theatrically-premiered in Europe in 2017).

So, let's unpack this space-cum-underwater romp from Phillip J. Roth's 112-films as-a-producer resume; he wrote 27 and directed 21. Here, Roth pens and produces.

So, once upon a time: There was a western movie called High Noon (1952) starring Gary Cooper as a small town Marshall. And there was a black and white sci-fi horror film, It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958). Then, as time passed: In the wake of Star Wars the latter film was unofficially remade as Alien (1979), while High Noon received an unofficial outer space makeover as Outland (1981) starring Sean Connery in the Gary Cooper role. And Outland wouldn't have existed if not for Alien becoming a box office hit. Got that?

Then, James Cameron sunk the genre with The Abyss (1989) and thou let loose an aquatic crop of ripoffs released in the early 1990s: There was Aliens from the Deep (from Italy), Deep Star Six (good ol' Carolco), The Evil Below, The Lucifer Rig, Leviathan, Lords of the Deep (good 'ol Roger Corman), and The Rift, aka Endless Decent -- which is not to be confused with the film at task: Dark Decent. (And there's a new crop of post-1990s-to-2010s waterloggers to discover on Tubi*.)

Ah, but all of those The Abyss rips had aliens or aquatic-based monsters: Yes, while Phillip J. Roth's UFO Studios put this 2002 (that rolled out in other markets until 2009) underwater sci-fi'er into production to ride James Cameron's 1989 wave, the model of Dark Descent (aka Descent Into Darkness on US video), as many other reviewers have name checked: Peter Hyams's earlier '81 romp, Outland.

As with the later, obviously superior-produced sci-horror Underwater (2020): We're in the Mariana Sea Basin, the deepest place on Earth (instead of Io around Jupiter), on a research-mining platform: a platform so massive that a very cool bullet train (all CGI'd, natch) is required to transverse the "industrial Atlantis." Keeping the peace is Officer Will Murdock of the Deep Submersible Division. (Yeah, I am digging those padded, all-black-leather cop duds that reminds of -- well, what do you know -- the wares in John Carpenters's Ghost of Mars from 2001 (a rip of his Assault on Precinct 13). You know what: Forget The Abyss from 1989 triggering Dark Descent into production. Carpenter's Mars cops-on-a-mission is the mold, here; which itself is a sci-if inversion of 1959's Rio Bravo, so there you go.)

Anyway, after taking down a brotherly criminal duo (killing one) working the aquatic mines, Murdock stumbles into a drug-running operation responsible for not only a rash of increasing violent crimes, but suicides (the catalyst is an dry-dock chamber accident by way of a miner's drug-triggered hallucination that kills several workers; a nice water-pressure spout through the chest gag, ensues). Ah, but those brothers work for the corporation that supplies the drugs than keeps the miners happy and productive. And Marshall Murdock has become a financial liability.

Two years later: Murdock's tour is over and he's readying to return to dry land. Ah, thanks to a convenient legal issue: Vlad is out and he's on the "noon-arriving" sub-shuttle to get his revenge. Murdock is left all alone to face Vlad: the corporation and the miners turn their back on him.

If you skimmed the other's reviews, you'll notice many chastise Dark Descent's set design and special effects. In reality: neither is that bad, as the CGI is more convincing than most budget conscious sci-fi'ers and the costuming is especially impressive; as is the cinematography and editing. Those reviewers' folly: Sure, while the proceedings are a note-for-note take on Outland (right down to a sympathetic doctor helping in the cause), one can't belly this Bulgarian production for the Euro theatrical market against the dual production powers of Warner Brothers and Columbia Studios: UFO will always lose that battle. So the key to enjoying this underwater-Alien hybrid is to view it through Roger Corman-tinted glasses: an affectionate throwback to the sets, effects, and costumes of New World Pictures' Alien knockoff of Galaxy of Terror (1981), William Malone's pretty darn fine Creature (1985), and the more plot-similar to Roth's vision: Moon 44 (1990) from Roland "Stargate/Independence Day" Emmerich -- with Michael Pare's space cop going against his own brand of corporate mining intrigue sans the xenomorphs.

Yeah, I really dig Michael Pare, even as his star has fallen (check out my favorable "user-review" of his Deep Impact-rip, Falling Fire from 1997) and he's gone into Eric Roberts, Bruce Willis, and Nicolas Cage direct-to-video territories. Regardless of the film each always bring their A-game to the set. And so does Dean Cain in his reinvention as a go-to direct-to-video actor. If you've never seen his Euro-made Rollerball rip known as Futuresport from 1998, check it out; outside of the presence of Vanessa Williams (ugh), it's inventive.

Well, so goes this review!

A discussion on the Star Wars-Alien-The Abyss mash-ups of the '80s continues at B&S About Movies with our features "Ten Films that Rip Off Alien," "Exploring: After Star Wars," and "Movies in Outer Space Week." Look for my full, official review of Underwater (2020) under the IMDb's "critic reviews," and a mini-review under "user reviews."

*You're on your own with these later, trapped-with-an-alien-in-a-confined-space flicks; but I recommend the Australian-made The Dark Lurking: it's better than the rest: Alien Rising (2013), Creature (2004), Dark Island (2010), Deep Evil (2004), The Dark Lurking (2009), Hydra (2009), Legion (1998), That Thing Below (2004), and Parasite (2004).

Many comments comparing this to Outland, but those commentors either never saw or have forgotten High Noon. Outland used to be called High Noon in outer space, and this one is High Noon under the sea. That being what it is, this actually has a pretty nice B-movie quality about it and is tight, well-paced, and probably one of Dean Caine's best outings. It never lagged, always made sense, no loose ends, and definitely has some decent effects, but not overpowering the story. A much more thoughtful B-movie than most and with good production values. Caine is fun to watch as the Marshall who can get no help, thankfully he's not a pitiful figure, but instead accepts his duty to go one against three. It's what John Wayne would have been like if he'd had the lead in High Noon. Of course he and John Ford hated that film anyway, and thankfully they showed it with their later stuff.