Under Water, No One Can Hear You Scream. . .

. . . but if you're lucky, they'll see the bubbles when they reach the surface. That'll tip them off. Tip them off to what, I'm not sure.

AMC was showing a movie called Below this afternoon, which I had never seen before but hey, possibly haunted WW2 submarine? Sold.

You have a submarine, minus its captain, which rescues three survivors of a torpedoed medical vessel. One of the three (Clare) is a woman, which is apparently bad luck for the ship, and might have been bad luck for her, since some of the boys might have been planning something. Fortunately, they dropped that plot thread. Or so Ebert's review said, I actually wasn't paying much attention the first 20 minutes or so, so I think I missed that entirely. Lucky me.

Anyway, things start going wrong for the sub. When they're trying to run silent, a record player abruptly comes on, playing a record that happened to be the not present captain's favorite. Turns out the captain died, though the exact method and reason change a couple of times, and we're never totally sure (I like that touch). The sub is being hounded, given no opportunity to surface, so its batteries can't be recharged, nor can the air supply be replenished. Also, there's an oil leak which must be repaired from the outside. I guess they weren't very deep, because they were basically in wet suits, and the pressure didn't kill them, though that water must have been hella cold on their exposed faces.

Between the being hounded by enemy vessels, the loss of the captain (and the less than steady hand of the lieutenant who's now in charge), the malfunctions that keep piling up, the steadily noxious air, and human nature, it's not surprising that faces start to appear, being seen in walls, mirrors, and all over the place. This leads to much freaking out, and when you can't keep your head, you tend to have accidents, and slowly, the only people who know what happened to the captain start dying. Well, it was happening slowly until that one idiot tried to turn on a flashlight with a broken lens, and well, lets just say there was a high percentage of hydrogen gas in the air, and the flashlight sparked. Yeah, you get the picture. But are they accidents, or is it a cruel hand from beyond the realm of the living? I think the movie hints strongly one way, but leaves it open enough that you can convincingly argue that it's just bad luck, or poor reflexes from a crew breathing air too high in carbon dioxide.

I think the movie wraps up a little too neatly, takes a little of the question of what might have happened to the captain out of the equation, and Ebert's right when he says the movie goes for the "surprise" frequently, but always accompanies it a sound, or some sharp musical note. It gets a little easy to predict, "Oh, she'll knock over the ink well, and it'll startle her, and she'll back up, and then we'll see something behind her that will scare her." They really ought to let the scene stand on its own sometimes.

I did like the scene where Loomis gets completely freaked out by his reflection, though I again thought they should have left his fate a little more ambiguous. I keep coming back to that, but this really feels like a movie where we aren't supposed to know what's really happening, but then they keep showing us what's happening. Sometimes that's good, but sometimes it ruins the uncertainty that makes the movie interesting.

The only other thing I have to say is that if, for some reason, they make a movie based off the Resident Evil 4 video game (I know, why would they do that?), Leon Kennedy should be played by Matthew Davis, who plays Ensign Odell in this movie. He struck me as looking really familiar to how Leon is portrayed, plus his character had honest and true - and as a result, trusting and naive - attitude that seemed to characterize Leon Kennedy.

Geez, it took me forever to finish this post. I kept getting distracted by Nintendo Short Cuts videos on Youtube. Curse Youtube, it's making it so I procrastinate from my time-wasting hobbies now!