Director/Screenplay/Producer/Photography – Charlie Steeds, Music – Matt Akers, Cthulhu Effects – Midnight Studios FX (Designer – Kyle Thompson). Production Company – Dark Temple Motion Pictures.
Derek Nelson (Jim Peters), Makenna Guyler (Christine Harris), Chris Lines (Jed Pickman), Kane Surry (Joe Meeker), Tim Cartwright (Gordon Atkins), Rowena Bentley (Julia Goldstein), Rory Wilton (Hank O’Connell)
Jim Peters, an astrobiologist at the Miskatonic University in London, is approached by a representative of the Pickman Corporation. He is asked to join an expedition aboard the new experimental submersible Providence 3 down into the newly discovered trench between South America and Antarctica that is now the deepest point of the ocean. They are to explore a mysterious stone portal that has been discovered on the ocean floor by a probe. The team set out, accompanied by the aging corporation head Jed Pickman. After passing through the portal, they inadvertantly awaken a vast ancient deity they discover there. Meanwhile, biological samples that Pickman demands they take from the creature start to affect and mutate the crew.
Charlie Steeds is a British director who has had a busy output of other low-budget horror films from the latter half of the 2010s onwards. He first appeared with the painfully bad Deadman Apocalypse (2016) but quickly moved to strength with the likes of Escape from Cannibal Farm (2017), The House of Violent Desires (2018), Winterskin (2018), The Barge People (2019), Death Ranch (2020), An English Haunting (2020), Vampire Virus (2020), A Werewolf in England (2020), Werewolf Castle (2021), Freeze (2022), The Haunting of the Tower of London (2022), He Sees You When You’re Sleeping (2024), Lord of Wolves (2024) and Night Harvest (2024).
It is only a few minute into Gods of the Deep before you realise that Charlie Steeds is making a Lovecraftian Film. There are assorted Lovecraft references throughout. The most notable of these is the title that comes up as the film opens for a Miskatonic University – although this has been relocated from Lovecraft’s setting in Arkham, Massachusetts to London. There is also a Pickman Corporation and its aging CEO, which appears to be named after a Lovecraft story Pickman’s Model (1927), which concerned the titular artist whose paintings conjured dark forces. The end credits also identify the creature on the ocean floor, which is unnamed throughout, as Cthulhu.
In its plot of explorers setting out in a submersible, the film resembles a spate of Underwater Adventures that came out around 1989 around the time of James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989) with the likes of Deepstar Six (1989), Leviathan (1989), Lords of the Deep (1989) and The Rift (1990), as well as the subsequent Michael Crichton film Sphere (1998). More recently, the genre was revived with Underwater (2020), which Gods of the Deep has been compared to and similarly features the waking of a Lovecraftian entity at the deepest point of the ocean.
Gods of the Deep is a film with not nearly enough budget to pull off the ambition it has. The conception of the portal and the Cthulhu monster are not bad and there are some okay creature mutations. On the other hand, the submarine interiors look like sets rather than the cramped interior of a real submersible. There is no production designer credit so it would appear that Charlie Steeds and co simply have dressed up industrial areas to look like the inside of the submarine. Unfortunately these look too much like regular corridors and consoles rather than the cramped quarters you get on an underwater vessel. Certainly, Steeds keeps editing moving sufficiently quickly to cover over these shortcomings for the most part but there are times it is obvious.
Gods of the Deep should not be confused with War-Gods of the Deep, the alternate title for the Vincent Price film The City Under the Sea (1965).
Trailer here