But of these first off the mark was Sean S. Cunningham’s entertainingly cheesy Deepstar Six. It was probably copied from the even more parsimonious Destination Inner Space (1966). Cunningham had started the decade off with his massively successful B-budget hit Friday the 13th (1980), although he never quite followed that success up in any substantial way and just remained making forgettable B-movies.

Certainly Cunningham is not above stealing from himself to fuel his shocks here – like mounting Friday’s just-when-you-thought-they’d-escaped climax over again. But then that’s only half the generic cliches Cunningham poaches, the mild surprise being that a few of them work quite well. The film is not quite as bad as many make it out to be. Cunningham conducts all the suspense and running around the underwater habitat with competent regard. And there’s a good deal of unintentional baloney that adds immeasurably to the basic entertainment value – like Miguel Ferrer (the film’s most enthusiastic over-actor amid the cast of mostly former tv stars and bit-players)’s death by a rather absurd case of the bends, or Marius Goring’s despatch by injection of explosive oxygen pellets. The monster is designed in such a way that it would have good deal of difficulty actually eating anything – in one of the more improbable moves it appears to be capable of biting a two-ton pressure suit in half, yet is restrained by a mere bulkhead door.