Proteus

Proteus, starring Craig Fairbrass
Proteus, starring Craig Fairbrass

Here’s another gloomy British monster movie set on a decrepit oil rig – see also the more recent Parasite – which, I guess, is a pretty good and much cheaper stand in for an outer space setting, which is essentially where these sub-Alien type films want to be set. Anyway, Proteus scores point for being one of the very few UK horror films – or, heck, low budget films of any kind – made before the arrival of lottery money and gangster chic in the late 90s. With the constant stream of modest, genre product that we currently have in this country, it’s easy to forget just how barren the 1980s and early 90s were for anyone whose taste ran to anything different from Merchant Ivory, Mike Leigh or Ken Loach. So, kudos to director Bob Keen and his associates for getting this made in the first place and, given its limitations, it’s not an unenjoyable way to waste an hour and a half.

A group of drug smugglers hit a hitch when their yacht blows up in the middle of the North Sea. Thankfully, they’re able to hop onto an inflatable dinghy and happen across an oil rig. A cursory investigation reveals that something’s not right: it’s full of high tech equipment which would suggest that it’s being used as some kind of experimental laboratory, but there’s nobody there they can ask about it. Well, apart from a couple of creepy doctors who skirt around in the shadows and refuse to have anything to do with them. And an enormous amount of slime.

Sure enough, it become clear that the boffins have managed to create something not particularly nice – a creature that’s made out of reformulated water and shark DNA or something, if you’re really interested – and it has managed to perfect the art of impersonating it’s victims, even down to their heroin addiction. Or, as the protagonist Alex (Craig Fairbrass) eloquently puts it, it’s ‘a fish with a drug habit’.

This was one of a series of films that seem to have been made with the intention of launching Fairbrass as a kind of low-budget star at the time. He’d already been around for a few years, but had just appeared in the two earliest Prime Suspect TV series and had a prominent supporting role in the surprisingly good Sly Stallone vehicle Cliffhanger, meaning that he had a modest kind of profile. This made him attractive to low-budget filmmakers, and he rapidly starred in Vadim Jean’s Beyond Bedlam (94), Julian Richards’ obscure Darklands (96) and an even more obscure crime flick called Killing Time (98). Sadly, his cinema career then went quiet while he concentrated on TV, most prominently with a long running part in Eastenders. In recent years, though, he seems to have reappeared on a number of direct to DVD films like Rise of the Footsoldier (07), Messiah (07) and even a reasonably high profile release in The Bank Job (08). I have a considerable soft spot for Fairbrass, who seems happy to have the kind of jobbing career that the likes of David Warbeck and Lewis Collins had a few years back, but it has to be acknowledged that – although he certainly looks the action hero part – he has a surprisingly charmless presence, making him a very hard performer to actually like.

The script here is based on a novel by John Brosnan, a long-term contributor to Starburst magazine who wrote a number of pulpy books under the pseudonym Harry Adam Knight (he also wrote the novel that Beyond Bedlam was based on). It’s familiar, predictable and features characters that behave in a wholly inconsistent fashion, but it’s not much worse than other, bigger, oceanic creature features of the time (Deep Rising (98), Deep Blue Sea (99) etc etc). Director Bob Keen is better known as a special effects maestro, having worked on the likes of Hellraiser (87), Event Horizon (97), Dog Soldiers (2002) and many, many more. But he’s also directed a good half-dozen films, often in Canada, none of which have exactly made waves at the box office. To be honest, his technique is pretty rudimentary, but he does keep the action moving and ensures that the animatronic make-up – which looks to have been heavily influenced by The Thing – is decently done.

Not bad, then, if nothing particularly special, and it stands as something of a curiosity; part of an failed attempt, maybe, to launch a homegrown horror scene with its own star.

About Matt Blake 890 Articles
The WildEye is a blog dedicated to the wild world of Italian cinema (and, ok, sometimes I digress into discussing films from other countries as well). Peplums, comedies, dramas, spaghetti westerns... they're all covered here.

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