Crash Dive

The venue is the Ulysses, a US Navy submarine carrying conventional and nuclear missiles. In the midst of an Atlantic storm, they respond to a distress call from the surface and pick up five Slavic lifeboat survivors, who repay the kindness by hijacking the ship and threatening to hurl nukes against major US cities unless they're paid $100,000,000 in gold. In fact, the quintet is a highly-trained terrorist crew backed by Mideast fanatics, and they plan to launch the missiles anyway. Authorities turn to James Carter (Michael Dudikoff), the former Navy SEAL who, by a providential coincidence, personally designed the Ulysses. Secretly communicating with hostage sailors, he manages to board the sub unbeknownst to the terrorists. But eventually chief bad guy Richter (Reiner Schone) realizes that an intruder is behind the sudden sabotage. Carter and the terrorists fight battles throughout the sub's corridors, their cat-and-mouse games complicated by another pursuing Navy submarine assigned to destroy the Ulysses as a last resort. Despite collateral damage, the Ulysses manages to torpedo them instead. Finally, Richter fires a missile at New York City, but Carter had pulled a computer switcheroo, and it's a non-nuclear warhead that blasts the top of the Empire State Building (apparently harming nobody at all). Aided by resourceful crewmen, Carter defeats the last of the terrorists, shoving Richter out of a hatch at a fatal depth.

This is an ambitious premise for low-budget actor-turned-filmmaker Andrew Stevens and tennis-pro-turned-producer Ashok Amritraj, both veterans of many erotic thrillers and horror cheapies. They carry their B-movie baggage aboard CRASH DIVE, with shallow performances, bilgewater dialogue (Carter flirts with a pretty landbound officer via radio whilst risking his life), gratuitous sex, and gratuitous rap music. There also is a gratuitous adorable little kid (Carter's motherless son) put at risk by a sudden urge to leave operations HQ and visit the Empire State Building just as Richter (whose handful of thugs take over an entire military vessel with absurd ease--couldn't it look a little difficult?) primes to unleash an atomic holocaust. Underwater special effects look awfully familiar, as well they should; they're the visuals used in the mainstream theatrical release CRIMSON TIDE (1995), created by the company Dream Quest Images, and bring to mind that classic experiment in cinematic context performed by Soviet theorists with the actor Ivan Mozhukhin. The trick shots seemed majestic and credible when matched to the dramatics of Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman. Paired with the comic-book heroics of CRASH DIVE, the same sequences look like chintzy pool toys. (Violence, substance abuse, extensive nudity, adult situations, profanity.)