The Bottom Line
Developed by a failing film studio in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Dwellers of The Deep turns mankind’s love affair with green energy into something akin to The Walking Dead. Circling the drain of 1983’s flopped CHUD movies, the screenplay screams poor taste louder than Naheed Neshi at a Boxing Day men’s wear sale.
Director-Screenwriter
Kim Phlopp
Cast
Kevin Bacon, Charlie Sheen, Kevin Bacon, Chuck Norris, 2 Baldwins and a Kardashian.
Brought to the screen by Prairie Philm Worx and distributed by Minhas Promotions, Dwellers of The Deep is at its core a portrayal of the strength of the human spirit. A team of uncanny heroes are central to the discovery of a lost civilization while drilling geothermal wells in a small, green-built suburb of Edmonton. A large complicated network of never before discovered caverns filled with droves of displaced east coasters are plumbed for the natural heat below the surface. When the caverns begin to cool off, the now angry and somewhat more deranged inhabitants find there way out and into the neighborhood above, where it is up to Danny Jeens and his drilling team to stop the end of the world.
Where do I start? I’m seriously thinking about handing this one over to Darcy and letting him struggle with nice ways to make dog shit attractive. This drowsy sleep easy work originated in the mind of a mediocre art school dropout from Melville, Saskatchewan. Kim Phlopp studied a little bit of theater in Calgary after high school, and gained a little exposure to the oil and gas industry making signs for service companies in his spare time.
After several old friends convinced him to move back to Saskatoon to start a fledgling film production studio, Phlopp decided that Saskatoon was where the money was, and he left. PPW is best known (if at all), for its 2 largest grossing films in 2009 and 2011. Swat This Mister, and Save The Last Doughnut for Grandma, together grossed $4300 in sales at 5 Saskatoon-area theaters. After the films, that starred local actors, failed miserably, PPW was almost at the end of its death spiral. But a recent trend in capital funding from PNG operators has given new breath to PPW, and this new movie has a cast that has to be seen to be believed.
The movie stars Chuck Norris and Kevin Bacon twice as the heroes of the story, with Charlie Sheen and a couple of Baldwins leading the gang of pseudo demonic staggering cave shits as they were so dramatically nicknamed by Sheen in an interview.
Norris plays Danny Jeens, a senior driller for Warmaire Drilling, and the protagonist in this 93 minute waste of torrent bandwidth. Although Norris still delivers his lines as though his jeans are too tight, his flair for the dramatic has not improved since we last saw him in 2013’s Dependables adult diaper commercials that aired on cable. Kevin Bacon plays a set of twins on Danny’s crew, which is great because no one can ever get enough bacon. Or at least that is what he keeps telling people at press junkets.
Personally, I’d like to put Bacon in a 16 foot skillet and drop him into an active volcano. If his typical abhorrent and skittish acting wasn’t enough, did the director really need to have his character doing Footloose moves every time he clubbed a grimy cave troll?
Along the way, Danny Jeens hooks up with a waitress from Nisku, Alberta played by one of the Kardashians, I’m still not sure which one, bad is bad, and at 45 minutes into the movie, I really didn’t care.
The movie culminates when Jeens and his crew decide to [SPOILER ALERT] plug the caves entrance with expanding foam that they found at an expanding foam warehouse in Leduc. Imagine that, a warehouse full of expanding foam. Norris gets to smirk, Bacon gets to touch Kanye’s left overs, and Sheen and the Baldwins get what they had coming to them – gallons of white sticky stuff pumped in their holes.
Proved Plus Probable Weekly News gives this movie 1 out of 5 stars. (And it only gets 1 because Cynthia and Yu love Bacon.)
