Who doesn’t like a good Alien ripoff? Well, lots of people, I imagine. Alien ripoffs proliferate, with multiple films made every year using the tried and true methods perfected by Ridley Scott back in the late 1970s. It’s a formula that never seems to go out of style, but that doesn’t guarantee good results.
1995 saw the release of Proteus, from screenwriter John Brosnan, adapting his own novel, and director Bob Keen, who has spent most of his career in special effects. Proteus, by the way, is an old Greek god of rivers and seas. The name doesn’t offer much of a clue to the proceedings in the film, but it does fit.
Proteus follows a small group of yuppies who get it into their heads to become drug smugglers. They leave the States with a yacht full of drugs but during their first night at sea, disaster strikes. The yacht catches fire, blows up, and the cast is set adrift in a liferaft. Things look desperate, but out of the fog-shrouded mists looms an oil rig. They all climb aboard, hopeful of rescue, but there wouldn’t be much of a movie if everything aboard the rig was okay.
The rig is the site of genetic experiments, the goal being to lengthen life. Scattered exposition tells the audience that while testing on animals, one of the tests was a roaring success, and a former bit of sea life has become a slimy…thing…capable of infecting, digesting, 
and imitating human life, memories and all. Maybe this is more a ripoff of The Thing. Anyway…
The yuppies, with muscular Alex (Craig Fairbrass) taking the lead, have to survive aboard the rig long enough to either send out a distress signal and wait for rescue, or flee in one of the rig’s own lifeboats, which should have a rescue beacon. There are options. Except, there’s a monster eating its way through the cast.
It doesn’t appear the film had much of a budget, so don’t expect to see much of the monster. In fact, its shape changing abilities seem more in service of the film’s limited resources rather than plot. The focus of the rambling story is to get the main characters into trouble with a monster, and the details of that monster are secondary.
Because relying on spectacle was beyond the film’s means, Keen had to dial up suspense. A shape shifter is good for that. Characters that are helpful at first, or horny, or whatever, lull the unsuspecting into a sense of safety, and then bad things happen. It sounds simple, but there are countless directors who have never been able to translate that simplicity into actual tension. Keen does so, despite this movie looking kin to some of the cheapest fare that Roger Corman was financing at the time.
Much of the film relies on the cast. At first, they appear no more talented than what one would expect from a b-movie. Because this film is so similar to both Alien and The Thing, it’s hard not to think back to the chemistry and professionalism in those casts compared to this. This cast is a little older than in some cabin in the woods flick, which is good. There is experience, and there is ability. Over the course of the film, the cast grew on me, from being rather anonymous to people I could root for. Especially Fairbrass. His character grates, but as the film goes on he does well carrying the leading man burden. He’s no Sigourney Weaver or Kurt Russell, but was just fine for this movie.
The game of cat and mouse between monster and the surviving cast leads to a glorious denouement, where Keen and company saved all their pennies and gave us a final monster. It’s big, ugly, and funny looking. In keeping with the movie’s derivative themes, the finale is a clash right out of The Thing, or Leviathan, or DeepStar Six, or Aliens, or any number of other films.
For a movie lacking in a single original idea, I’m surprised that it’s so entertaining. From an objective standpoint, there’s nothing special about the movie. It’s cheap and mediocre. However, from the perspective of the shitty movie fan, it’s not that bad. Proteus enters the Shitty Movie Sundays Watchability Index at #302, displacing Mindkiller.
Keep an eye out for Doug Bradley of Hellraiser fame, and Ricco Ross, who played Frost in Aliens, in minor roles.