Runtime: An overly long 113 minutes
Directed by: Arseny Syuhin
Starring: Milena Radulovic, Sergey Ivanyuk, Nikolay Kovbas, Vadim Demchog, Kirill Kovbas
From: Several different Russian companies
The Superdeep having a 2.66:1 aspect ratio is not even the most baffling thing about this production.
Last time, I saw lousy 2021 horror movie The Devil Below. One scene referenced a myth surrounding the Kola Superdeep Borehole, a real life hole drilled in 1970's Soviet Union. Allegedly, they drilled so deep that “they recorded the damned wailing souls of Hell”... only the audio provided was taken from the Mario Bava movie Baron Blood! Hilarious. When I saw on Shudder that this was also based on the myth, it sounded like a nice idea on paper. Unfortunately... if nothing else, this will help provide inspiration to try harder in the task of seeing GOOD horror on the obscure side.
A young lady in 1984 Russia named Anna studies diseases; the opening is unintentionally eerie in that it deals with a vaccine and it being fast-tracked... before any controversy can even possibly start, the opening was solely to establish her profession and give her trauma which will haunt her later. She is part of a team of soldiers and a typical Soviet bureaucrat who you might as well have seen in Chernobyl who are at Kola due to “mysterious events”. It has to be noted that this is a rather fanciful version of the deep hole (insert your own jokes if you wish). Instead of a hole 9 inches in diameter, it is a giant shaft-heh heh-which has an elevator and two large stations thousands of meters deep in the ground. The big bad: yes, it does relate to Anna's line of work-and is also heavily indebted to Carpenter's The Thing.
Its obvious inspirations is not the issue, nor was the odd decision to film this in such a wide aspect ratio, although I don't know why it was done aside from “Why the hell not?” or “Tarantino did it for The Hateful Eight, so why can't I?” This Russian film is on Shudder dubbed in English; that was only part of why the plot is so incoherent and muddled. This overlong picture has a real mess of a story and that's tragic as the general idea wasn't bad, there's gore and squishy special effects. Sadly, there's bad world-building, an unclear layout of the facility & characters who usually aren't given any characterization at all. Henceforth, the whole experience was more like an endurance test, and this is too long at almost 2 hours.
Heck, even the effects aren't always filmed well, and from what I saw the practical ones didn't look too bad-note that I said nothing about the substandard CGI. Lead girl Milena Radulovic did give it her all & I do feel bad the story or filmmaking in general could not rise up to match her trying her hardest. There are more worthwhile obscurities on Shudder, believe me; as this had something when it came to the general plot, that makes its failures all the more disappointing.
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