THE EVIL BELOW

CONTAINS SPOILERS....GLUB GLUB GLUB

I don't demand a huge amount from a movie. In fact I only ask three things: firstly, just tell me a story. Secondly, make it a good one. And finally, tell it well. I don't even mind too much if it's not that great a story if the telling is interesting. Hell, if it's a terrible story abysmally told I might still get enough fun out of it. But a dull story, flatly presented (or in the case of poncy arthouse fare, no story at all) is where I start yelling at the screen.

The Evil Below is a miserable little film without charm, style or humour in which a C-minus cast plod through a quagmire of implausibility, cliche and tedium. June Chadwick is an English art teacher who has quit her job and cashed in her life savings to look for a mythical 17th century galleon that supposedly disappeared in the Caribbean, oblivious to the notions that [1] no-one's located this thing in over three hundred years and [2] it's MYTHICAL. She hooks up with allegedly hunky boat owner Wayne Crawford to go and look for this thing, he's got no choice because he's broke and can't pay his dock fees and they're about to repossess his boat (yada yada) but there are sharks in the area, crooks and gangsters are on the trail of the El Diablo as well, a priest is murdered, there's a 300-year old man keeping watch over the cursed treasure....

I did a lot of yelling at the screen, most of it rude. It's a staggeringly boring film, uninteresting to look at, and Wayne Crawford isn't leading man material. When I think of all the things I could have been doing with the evening - watching Blade Runner, doing the washing up, developing a crystal meth habit - I'm almost as annoyed with myself for sticking with this turd than I am with the makers for dropping it in the first place. Worthless on pretty much every level there is.

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