Wednesday 11 July 2012

THE WATERMEN

CONTAINS SPOILERS GLUB GLUB GLUB

I had actually seen this before at the 2011 Frightfest Halloween event. Not all of it, though: I have to confess I fell asleep so I've had to wait for the DVD in order to see the film properly from start to finish. And I know I'm eight months late to the party here, but it is a monumental stinker: boring, stupid, predictable and pointless, and further proof as to why the film-making process should be made more expensive and more difficult in order to stop thundering cretins from getting their clueless amateur pisspuddles on screens.

In a so-called film strongly reminiscent of (but surprisingly not as interesting as) Shark Night 3D and Harpoon: Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre, three bikini bimbos and three unspeakable douchebags go out on a dubious fishing trip for no immediately obvious reason beyond the fact that the lead douchebag, an odious trustfund wanker who gets his balls out on Skype and giggles like a simpleton at those funny webcam distortion effects that make you look like a Martian or a potato, wants to show off his yacht (and so that the three girls can lounge around in bikinis and flash their rubber tits around). But then the boat breaks down and they're eventually rescued by The Watermen, the local fishermen who've been working those waters for generations - but do they have something more sinister in mind?

Yet again it's a film that presents a roster of deeply uninteresting sub-human imbeciles, potheads and arseholes about whom it's impossible to give two hoots as to whether they live or die (except for the lead douchebag, for whom no amount of being smacked round the head with a chair leg is going to feel excessive). Nor do we have any interesting villains either; they're the standard horror trope of (presumably) inbred weirdos mumbling incomprehensibly, giggling like Beavis and Butthead at the chance of sexually abusing the women, and hacking their victims to pieces in a shack. Everything's absolutely predictable and the movie holds absolutely no surprises. And most of the second half consists of the survivors and the inbreds wandering endlessly around the desolate marshlands in the middle of the night.

That it's got some blood and gore and tits in it doesn't mean The Watermen is anything like anywhere near half-good enough and it sure as hell doesn't justify a rental fee. What annoys isn't so much the painful mediocrity on display - there have always been rubbish movies and there always will be - it's that it cheapens horror cinema and movies in general. Enough one-star rubbish brings down the average standard, and it makes it harder for the genre to maintain a level of respectability if this is the kind of garbage filmmakers think we'll put up with. Really, if you have a choice between making a piece of rubbish and not making anything, sometimes it's better to not make anything. And if you've a choice between watching a piece of rubbish and not watching anything, in this instance not watching anything really is the better option. If this hadn't been a FrightFest screening that I fell asleep halfway through, even I wouldn't have bothered with it.

*

Don't buy The Watermen. Buy one of these instead:

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