Nobody is going to make a better shark movie than “Jaws” but that hasn't stopped people from trying. In fact, shark thrillers are so commonplace that nearly every variation on the premise has been tried. Most of these sharks-ploitation flicks get chummed out onto DVD or video-on-demand, unnoticed by any but the most devoted fish fans. This was nearly the fate of “47 Meters Down.” The Weinsteins gobbled the movie up and intended to dump it on disc with the generic title “In the Deep.” (No doubt the re-titling was a result of Bob insisting that stupid Americans wouldn't know what a meter was and that “154.2 Feet Down” is a shitty title.) A week before the intended release, the movie was fished out of obscurity by a new distributor. I'm reviewing the movie now as part of my Horror Around the World journey. This is more than a bit of a cheat. The director is English, the producer is French, many of the names behind and in front of the camera were American. However, it was shot and co-produced in the Dominican Republic, making it another rare horror flick to come out of the Caribbean. Close enough for me.
Adventurous Kate has convinced her more reserved sister Lisa to go on vacation with her in Mexico. This comes at a time when Lisa is especially vulnerable, having gotten unexpectedly dumped by her long-time boyfriend. The sisters meet two guys, Javier and Louis, in a bar. The men convince the women to go on an adventure the next day: They know a guy who owns a boat and claim they regularly go cage diving with his equipment, to observe the local great white shark population. Upon seeing the janky quality of the boat, Lisa is reluctant but Kate convinces her to go. After a few scenic moments under the waves and getting up-close with the huge fish, everything goes wrong. The wench breaks. The cage is sunk meters below. The sisters can communicate via the radio in their helmets but are outside the range of the boat. Their oxygen supply is limited. The depths are dangerous. The certainty of help arriving is not great. And, of course, there are the sharks. The sharks are very hungry.
It is a good thing that “47 Meters Down” is so strong as a technical exercise. As a screenplay, it's rather preposterous. While discussing “247°F” recently, I was discussing the pitfalls of the confined space premise. This movie doesn't make as many unlikely contrivances as that one. Cage diving, when surrounded by sharks, is already a scenario with a degree of danger to it. The idea that something could go wrong doesn't seem improbable. However, once again, how do you get a whole movie out of people sitting in a cage underwater? The girls are repeatedly warned not to leave the cage. The script comes up with one excuse after another to have them do so anyway. Once they run out of air, the story is over, right? And there's not much of a movie here if the leads can't talk to each other? Trying to set up events so specifically that these elements don't impede the story does push the suspension of disbelief. That's only to make the story possible. To get this already dire scenario to escalate makes more wacky shit has to go down. By the time an errand spear gun or fake-out climax occurs, Roberts' screenplay is starting to push pass its luck.
Maybe that doesn't matter so much. Maybe the viewer is meant to simply put themselves in this same situation, to wonder how they'd do if stuck in a cage under water and surrounded by ravenous sharks. Perhaps that kind of what-if thinking doesn't work on me, a person who would absolutely never be out on the water in the first place. Much less under it. I've seen too many shark movies for that! I'm not going in the ocean! Simply as a delivery system for Great White Shark related thrills, “47 Meters Down” does its job. Roberts is skilled enough to get more out of this premise than a weaker filmmaker could. He also knows when to cut it off, the movie not overstaying its welcome. The special effects are strong too, better than your usual direct-to-video sharks-ploitation flick. Putting the movie in theaters was a smart move. It grossed sixty-two million. Roberts came back for a sequel and another follow-up is currently awaiting release. Apparently some DVDs with the title “In the Deep” did make it out there though, becoming collector's items of some value. Not much Dominican color though but I did have a reasonably entertaining time with this one. [6/10]
Look at the poster art for "Warlock III: End of the Innocence." It is, somehow, perfectly representative of the time and place from which it emerged. The release of "Scream" in 1996 revitalized the horror genre by emphasizing a hip youthfulness that, I guess, somebody felt it had been lacking. That meant a succession of movie posters that put the young, photogenic faces of its cast right up there, front and center. Despite cashing in on the title of a cult classic from a prior era in horror, "Warlock III" does exactly that. Paradoxically, the edgy fashion of the actors on-display, their brooding faces, and the pseudo-poetic subtitle suggest a film desperate to appeal to the alternative and goth subcultures of the late nineties, people opposed to the shiny, pretty aesthetic of the mainstream. Notably not among those faces is Julian Sands, the star of the previous "Warlock" films, whose particular screen presence was a big factor in the franchise's success up to that point. All of these elements seem to tell the viewer that TriMark's attempt to revive "Warlock" six years after the last one wanted to appeal to a massive audience but also a niche subculture but not fans of the previous movies this one is ostensibly a sequel to. Seems very counterproductive to me but I guess I'm not a Hollywood marketing guy.
I say ostensibly because, yes, "The End of the Innocence" shares no connection to either of the previous "Warlock" movies, aside from featuring a blonde British guy in black killing people with magic. Our protagonist is Kris, a college art student. Adopted as a child, she has no knowledge of her true parentage. When she receives news of inheriting a secluded house in the countryside, she takes it as a chance to uncover more information about her birth parents. She goes alone and discovers a dilapidated and isolated home, beginning to have strange dreams and visions of a little girl with a doll. Her boyfriend Michael arrives unannounced and brings their friends with him: The wiccan Robin, the pining Jerry, and the kinky couple Scott and Lisa. All of them are unaware that, some three hundred years earlier, an evil warlock named Philip Covington lived in this home. He attempted to sacrifice a child – seemingly Kris' ancestor – but was imprisoned in the home's walls. Now he is free again. He uses dark magic to convince Kris' friends, one by one, to surrender her to him so that he can make the girl the mother of a child from Hell.
The script for “The End of the Innocence,” by Freiser and TriMark producer Bruce Eisen in his sole writing credit, is quite confusing. The exact connection between Kris and the little girl we keep seeing flashbacks of is never quite defined. How it is known the house is in her name when she doesn't know who her real parents are especially baffles me. I was never quite sure why exactly the Warlock had to corrupt Kris' friends, convincing them to willingly give up on her, for his magical ritual to work. On a more brass tacts level, the story doesn't work entirely because we do not care if Kris' friends sell her out to evil to escape eternal torment. Each one of them are so obnoxiously one-note. Thier kinky sex life is only thing defining Scott and Lisa. Jerry's crush on Kris and fondness of music is brought up a lot but never actually amounts to anything. The how and why of Michael's attachment to Kris is never shown to us. Trying to build actual tension of the dynamic between characters we don't care about, with so little depth to them, leads to a movie without much tension.
Subbing in for Julian Sands is Bruce Payne. He's not bad. Payne has played bad guys a lot and can bring a certain degree of villainous charm, dark charisma, or brute force intimidation to the part. He looks good in black leather while gazing wickedly from the darkness. He simply doesn't bring the hint of chaotic glee that Julian Sands had. In fact, this Warlock seems to be having a fairly miserable time. “Hellraiser's” Ashley Laurence co-stars as Kris and she's merely serviceable in the part. Her presence draws inevitable comparisons to all the shitty “Hellraiser” sequels that came out in the nineties. I suppose we should be thankful that the Warlock didn't become like Pinhead, forced to strut his way through increasingly dire direct-to-video slop. There have been a few other attempts to expand this franchise – a Sega Genesis video game to tie-in with part two, a four issue comic book inexplicably published in 2009 – but otherwise this one successfully killed the franchise. [4/10]
“Alien: Earth” starts to develop an actual sense of movement in its seventh episode but only a little. Disturbed by the brain-hacking that was done to Nibs and the apparent death of Isaac/Toodles, Wendy decides to round up a couple of the other Lost Boys and flee the island with her brother. I only say a “couple” because Slightly and Curly are involved in another subplot, seemingly forgotten by our heroine. They drag the face-hugged body of Arthur out into the jungle, walk around with him under false pretenses, and then gawk in horror as a creature bursts from his chest. This does not please Morrow and the Yutani team of commandos that have landed on the island. They end up getting captured by Prodigy's forces, who now have the new Chestburster in their possession. Good for them too, because Wendy just let the other Xenomorph out of its cage. It's okay, for her anyway, because the alien seems to obey her commands. Meanwhile, Boy Kavalier gets excited about a sheep.
I hate to say something dramatic like “This episode of television broke me” but... At the very least, I think “Emergence” has successfully broke any interest I have in “Alien: Earth.” After six hours of watching the show spin its various wheels, we are starting to get some level of pay-off. Unfortunately, more must always be left for the next hour, to insure that streaming service subscribers remain ready to tune in next time. Thus, Morrow's entire scheme to manipulate Slightly into getting a Facehugger to impregnate someone and to sneak the invetro Xenomorph off the island amounts to the a big fat bunch of nothing. The hyper-confident cyborg mercenary immediately gets taken capture. This could have been avoided if the gestation period of the Xenomorphs, once they are inside a person, followed any sort of logical schedule. Instead, the aliens only burst out when the plot deems it dramatic enough, meaning some bad timing screws over the scheme the villain has been building up for almost the entire season.
This is, one assumes, meant to operate as commentary on the very stupid cyberpunk future we are actually living in. However, as I previously stated, simply pointing out that billionaire tech lords are all impulsive, entitled, idiotic children does not qualify as commentary to me anymore. Truthfully, though, I'm not upset. Because I don't care. Because I hate Boy Kavalier and his slumpy-eyed super-sheep. I hate Nibs. More accurately, I had no feelings about her at all until she started screaming, jumping, and tearing people's jaws off. Most of all, I hate that Wendy now has a pet xenomorph. She signals to it with in its own language, the beast attacking at her command and bowing its dome towards her. It is, in my opinion, all very silly and far too self-important in its ambitions to be accepted as camp. “Emergence” suggests two things to me. That this season's arc was made up as it went along. And that the people involved in writing this show were not interested in, nor especially respectful of, the same elements of the “Alien” franchise that I am. [4/10]
I have enough nostalgia for “Beyond Belief? Fact or Fiction” to give it a second look this year. Once again, Jonathan Frakes presents five short stories, some of them being entirely fictional and some of them being extremely loosely based on true event. “Kirby” is named for the animatronic gorilla a special effects technician has built for an upcoming film. The producer treats Kirby and his creator poorly, resulting in the robot gorilla taking revenge when the man comes to the studio by himself. “Dust” follows a pair of college students who spot an attractive woman trying to break into a house. They decide to help her enter only to learn, the next day, that the home is abandoned. “Malibu Cop” sees a police detective investigating a murder on the beach he lives on. “A Joyful Noise” concerns a church choir group who all suffer unexpected delays on the way to practice, the same day the building happens to burn down. “The Hooded Chair” is about a rich collector buying a chair said to bring death to anyone who sits in it, a curse he soon discovers is real.
“Beyond Belief?” is a show that essentially knee-capped itself with its own premise. By squeezing five stories into each episode, it necessitated each segment had to be short, extremely simple, and straight to the point. This led to most scenarios feeling like re-tellings of old urban legends and ghost tales, setting up a situation right away before immediately subverting it. This is very true of “Dust,” essentially a variation on the Vanishing Hitchhiker premise. The minute the two guys – one of which is played by the wacky room mate from the college seasons of "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" – spot the strange acting lady, you know she's a ghost. At least the way this is revealed, via their foot steps appearing in the dust on the floor, is mildly meat. “A Joyful Noise” plays out like something your mom would re-post on Facebook, a faux-inspirational and reportedly true event that proves that God is good and the universe is magical or something. Pretty lame but at least the actors, playing broad stereotypes of church-going black folks, are having fun.
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