The 1999 sci-fi horror movie Deep Blue Sea had a lot going for it. Sweet LL Cool J soundtrack? Check. Giant killer sharks? check. Ridiculously silly death sequences? Double check! Even by the standards set by the era in which it was released (Lake Placid, and Anaconda, both came out around that time), Deep Blue Sea had a fairly ridiculous premise: A scientist genetically modifies sharks to make them more intelligent, but her experiments come back to bite her and the team at the underwater research lab in the butt (and everywhere else). The movie wasn’t exactly widely praised by critics, but it went on to take a solid haul at the box office and became a DVD staple for many action fans. This success was mainly down to the laughable plot, although I like to think that sweet, sweet LL Cool J soundtrack helped a little. But, it turns out a proposed sequel would have taken Deep Blue Sea‘s underwater madness and cranked it right up to eleven.
In a recent interview with B.M.D, director Jack Perez revealed he was approached about the possibility of helming an indirect sequel to Deep Blue Sea. Perez had, apparently, impressed with his work on the even more preposterous Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, earning him the right to go into Warner Premeier and pitch a story for a Deep Blue Sea sequel.
“I didn’t know exactly what they were looking for, but it seemed that the natural way to go was to jack it up the way Aliens had jacked things up into a combat film. So that’s what I pitched, and Matt Bierman, the senior vice president at Warner Premiere, essentially said, ‘That sounds great.’”
I know what you’re thinking: “How do you ‘jack up’ a movie that had super-intelligent killer sharks?’ It’s a question that Perez had a rather interesting answer to…
What they were interested in was keeping the theme of shark experimentation. The script is about this scientific research ship that is seized by Somali pirates, and a team of Navy SEALs have to go in and take them out. The whole ship is basically a gigantic floating laboratory, with a maze of tunnels that the sharks can travel through that open up into tanks. My thinking was that this was Sgt. Rock vs. sharks, so I developed this platoon kind of based on my favorite Sgt. Rock characters. To a certain degree, it was similar to what they did in Predator; there were definitely echoes of that sort of motley group.
On paper, it seems absolutely comical, but my intention was to make these sharks Frankenstein-style mutations that were tragic and violent. With the exception of the quipping between the soldiers, it wasn’t going to be played for humor.
It turns out that those mutations on the sharks would involve some of the beast having machine guns and torpedos incorporated into their perfectly evolved bodies. Again, I know what you’re thinking, but Perez swears that he wasn’t inspired by Dr. Evil’s laser beam sharks from Austin Powers.
