The Reel Review
Soviet researchers in 1984 arrive at a secret underground research facility in the Arctic, after 20 workers disappear shortly after reporting hearing what sounds like voices from the world’s deepest borehole. Expecting to find a disease outbreak, what they find is much worse. The setting for the sci-fi/horror is based on the real-life Kola Superdeep Borehole.
The Superdeep is a hot, stinkin’… bore. Ripping off storylines from way better-made horror classics like Alien and The Thing, the only things this nonsensical creature feature has going for it are an effectively gruesome and disturbing monster and a cool, period appropriate score.
Neither, however, are enough to make up for there being no real plot. Star Milena Radulovic, who also was one of the film’s writers, leads a very wooden cast saddled with a shocking amount of mindless, inane dialogue. The slow pacing makes the two hours feel like Hell.
REEL FACTS
• The inspiration for The Superdeep is the world’s deepest manmade borehole, the Kola Superdeep Borehole located in the Russian Arctic near the Norwegian border. After two decades of drilling, Soviet engineers in 1989 reached 7.6 miles (12,262 km) before their drills started melting. Among the startling discoveries: deep parts of the Earth’s crust were saturated with water, and microscopic plankton fossils were discovered just six km below the surface.
• The urban legend about the Kola Superdeep Borehole is that a microphone was lowered into the hole and detected what sounded like people screaming in agony and pain – as though they were in Hell. Subsequently determined as fake, the audio was dubbed from the 1972 horror film Baron Blood.
• The Superdeep’s producers created an alternate version that is 15 minutes shorter, presumably to tighten up the story.
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