Monsters of the Deep: A strange, salty time capsule

Is it worth your time?

If you have a thing for vintage documentary footage and don't mind a bit of grim reality, maybe. It’s definitely not for animal lovers who get upset easily—the flensing scene is, uh, something else entirely. If you want a polished, modern nature doc, stay away. This is for the folks who like their cinema raw and a little bit dusty.

The whole thing feels like a fever dream of a fishing trip. You’ve got this group of guys from all over the place—Chinese, Irish, Russian, Swedish—crammed onto a boat. It’s the kind of international mix that feels like the start of a joke, but they just end up catching fish.

They actually steal a couple of seal pups. Like, they just grab them, bring them on board as pets, and then get annoyed that they’re difficult to handle. It’s such a bizarre, impulsive detail that you’d never see in a movie made today. The cameraman just keeps rolling like it’s perfectly normal behavior.

The brutal bits

Then there’s the whaling part. It isn't subtle. Watching them strip the blubber off a whale—the 'blanket,' they call it—is heavy stuff. It’s not meant to be a lecture, just a record of how things were done. It’s jarring how quickly they move from catching cute fish to industrial-grade butchery.

The crew eventually goes after a 'devil fish,' which is basically a giant manta ray. The scale of the thing is hard to wrap your head around, even in grainy black and white. Seeing a small boy stand inside the mouth of this massive, dead creature is one of those images that sticks to your brain for a week.

It reminds me a bit of the rugged, 'man against nature' spirit you see in Adventure Mad. There’s that same sense of just throwing yourself at the ocean and hoping you survive the day.

• The seal pups really deserve better.
• The editing feels like it was done with a pair of rusty scissors.
• I still don’t understand why they thought the seal pups would make good house pets on a boat.
• The hammerhead shots are actually kind of tense.

It’s an uneven watch, for sure. Sometimes it’s just a list of things they saw, like a grocery store receipt for the ocean. Other times, it’s genuinely captivating to see these massive beasts hauled up from the dark water.

Don't expect a narrative arc here. It’s just people on a boat doing stuff. Sometimes they catch things, sometimes they don't. It doesn't care if you're bored or if you're uncomfortable. It just is.

It’s not a masterpiece. But it’s definitely a trip. 🌊