6 Films That Are The Ultimate Guilty Pleasure

Deep Blue Sea (1999)

There are times when all you need to distract yourself from the dark spiral threatening to envelop your stress-addled mind is a bunch of super-sharks wreaking revenge on the scientists that enlarged their brains. That’s what we get with Deep Blue Sea – Renny Harlin’s action movie ode to the dangers of scientific advancement.

Dr. Susan McAlester (Saffron Burrows) and her colleagues are working in a remote marine facility to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, using the brain tissue of the three Mako sharks they have in captivity. As the sharks become increasingly aggressive and calculating, it transpires that McAlester has been secretly using genetic engineering techniques on the sharks, in an attempt to increase the size of their brains – theoretically increasing the chance of finding a cure. Unfortunately, all that is achieved is the creation of three enraged and resentful killing machines.

The guilty pleasure aspect of Deep Blue Sea comes from the joy with which it embraces its own outlandishness – picking every last morsel of flesh from the bones of scenes, in which people are brutally attacked just as they get caught up in giving an important motivational speech, or in which people sacrifice themselves to save a colleague. Like the sharks being tortured in the name of science, Deep Blue Sea exudes self-awareness and a determination to wring the potential from each moment of the script. This is a film that truly goes for it – and that is a fully-realised guilty pleasure.