In the dark, blue depths of the killer shark movie, there is a dorsal thin line between a movie about sharks eating people and movie that has sharks eating people. What exactly do I mean by that? Well, lets use Deep Fear, a new watery thriller as an example.
You see while there are a few, hefty-sized great whites floating about the place during Deep Fear’s zippy run time, they aren’t so much the focus of the story as an obstacle to navigate in a film where the real threat are a bunch of bug eyed criminals (think of the moray eel in Peter Benchley’s The Deep). Thus we don’t so much have a killer shark thriller, as a thriller with killer sharks in it.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped the ad men from using the presence of sharks and drug smugglers to slap all over the poster, making a rather serious minded film desperately try to invoke the coke dusted carnage of Cocaine Bear. While mercifully holding back on renaming the movie Great (China) White, or Deep Blow Sea or something, Deep Fear’s ad campaign still seems to be setting itself up to sink…
In the staggeringly lush blues of the Caribbean, we find the loved-up couple Naomi and Jack who run a charter business with a beautiful, 47-foot yacht named the Serenity. While Naomi is an accomplished around-the-world yahctswoman who seems to have the physical proportions of a 1998 era Lara Croft (think Tomb Raider III and you’ll be surprisingly close), she also has inner turmoil as she still has reoccurring dreams of nearly drowning in the boating accident that sent her parents to hang out at Davy Jones’ locker.
In order to get ready for their next batch of customers to climb aboard the Serenity, Jackson takes a helicopter to Grenada to get things sorted while Naomi sails the boat there, but during her three day trip she has to veer the boat slightly off course to avoid a building squall – but as does so, she comes across something that’ll slow her down something awful. Clinging to a piece of flotsam are Maria and Tomas, two hapless souls who have been shipwrecked, but when the kind hearted Naomi attempts to rescue them she discovers that a third member of their group, Maria’s brother Jose, is still trapped in the wreckage down below in a rapidly shrinking air pocket.
Grabbing some scuba gear on board, Naomi and Tomas rescue Jose, but at a cost with the shipwrecked third-world getting munched on by a hefty great white shark, but matters gets instantly worse when Naomi discovers that the people she’s rescued are actually cold-hearted drug smugglers who require her boat and nautical skills to get them to the Florida Quays. However, before any of that can happen, Naomi has to dive down once again and retrieve their sizable, but sunken, haul of cocaine – sharks or no sharks…
Seemingly created to be the sort of movie that begrudgingly gets picked if no one can agree on what to stream that night, Deep Fear does its very best to quietly appear like a slick, sexy, sun-kissed thriller that has the added bonus of having toothy man-eaters glide by every now and then to suddenly reduce the minimalist cast with some diligent chewing action.
At first, Deep Fear does actually seem like a good, last minute choice as it includes all the aspects you need for a harmless time waster. The location is suitably gorgeous with bright blue skies and crystal clear waters and its voluptuous heroine has numerous scenes where she’s lounging around in poses that look about a natural as a Victoria’s Secret catalogue. On top of that, the thriller plot is childishly easy to grasp as it lays out the villain’s desperate plan neatly and plainly while hardly pausing to bring up anything as paultry as plot holes as it hopes with its fingers and fins crosed that the tension of the situation is enough to carry it along. Director Marcus Adam’s (responsible most noticably for a clutch of music videos and forgotten 2002 Ouija horror, Long Time Dead) approach is simple – not even Ed Wood could screw up shooting these views – and he’s even aided by a couple of familiar faces such as Gossip Girl’s Ed Westwick and Macarena Gomez who continues her glaring ways from stella Spanish horror show, 30 Coins. Most impressively of all, the CGI on the sharks is actually pretty damn good that renders the underwater death machines as actual animals rather than monsterously machiavellian meat munchers.
However, sadly, here’s where my positive remarks dry up because once you peer past the low budget glamour of the luscious Bahamian and Grenadian vistas (actually mostly Malta) and a lead who wears distractingly tight clothing (no shapeless sweats for this lady), Deep Fear process to be a barely entry level shark powered thriller.
Firstly the film has absolutely nothing going on in its empty head beyond “smugglers-make-pretty-lady-dive-in-dangerous-water” and that’s certainly not because it has a single minded purpose dedicated to stripped back thrills. In fact, at times the whole film feels less like a completed script and more like they filmmakers just shot straight from the original screenwriters treatment in an effort to save time. Similarly, thanks to that old trick of blatantly lying on your poster, the sharks are something of an after thought, only gliding into action when the movie is in danger of grinding to a halt and needs a cheap shock moment to liven things up when the A-plot repeatedly floundered.
The acting is rudimentary at best, with 90% of the cast speaking their lines with thick accents that are rarely given a chance to go beyond “scared” or “tense” without adding a single extra thing to the characters apart from “hero” or “villain” – however, most can’t even manage that. Ed Westwick as the worried boyfriend is saddled with a tacked on, why-won’t-she-marry-me subplot and subsequently is a bland as stale bread while you’ll genuinely be uncertain whether lead Mãdãlina Ghenea is either a bad actress or simply loaded up with Nicole Kidman levels of botox that renders her expressions to the uncanny valley level of your average sex bot.
However, all this could arguably be forgiven if the movie stuck to its simple guns and delivered it’s own climax, however, in its closing moments, Deep Fear out and out attempts to stage an aquatic grand theft ending by stealing the final moments of 1989 thriller Dead Calm wholesale, right down to the unorthodox usage of a flare gun and cheekily hopes no one will notice. It’s the last straw for a low budget effort that tries too hard to lazily riff on other movies that will ultimately leave you much like the cocaine sodden sharks themselves: doped to the gills.
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