Deep, The (1977)

The second of a watery trilogy of films deriving from the novels of Peter Benchley (Jaws came before it in 1975, and The Island after in 1980).

Jacqueline Bisset and Nick Nolte starred as Gail Berke and David Sanders, a couple of treasure-seekers who became entangled in voodoo and drug smuggling off the coast of Bermuda.

With 40% of his action taking place underwater in creepy depths, director Peter Yates didn’t have to do much to keep tension on an even keel, and the mean moray eel sequence was a real shocker.

Slick photography aside, the silly script about rival divers searching for shipwrecked drugs and two-dimensional characterisations from Nolte, Robert Shaw (as a grumpy seafarer called Romer Treece who lives in a converted Lighthouse) and Louis Gossett Jr (as local crime lord Henri Cloche) succeeded in sinking plausibility every time anything resembling reality threatened to surface.

But Bisset in a wet T-shirt and Donna Summer‘s title disco hit were enough to make this soggy saga a major box-office hit in the summer of 1977.

Romer Treece
Robert Shaw
Gail Berke
Jacqueline Bisset
David Sanders
Nick Nolte
Henri Cloche
Louis Gossett Jr
Adam Coffin
Eli Wallach
Kevin
Robert Tessier
Ronald
Earl Maynard
Slake
Dick Anthony Williams
Wiley
Bob Minor
Johnson
Lee McClain
Young Adam Coffin
Peter Wallach
Young Romer Treece
Colin Shaw
Mate
Peter Benchley

Director
Peter Yates