Tuesday, November 17, 2009

In short: Escape From Coral Cove (1986)

A group of young, rich, boring idlers spends some summer days in the beach resort of Coral Cove. They waterski. They dive. They are jealous. They are potential final girls. One of 'em is called Four-Eyes (Louis Kong) and has a little brother.

After hours of painful "excitement" with them, a friendly dead guy (Roy Cheung) starts to kill off the annoying people. Instead of thanking the dead guy or making him president of the yacht club or something, a security guard calls his uncle, a buddhist exorcist.

Too bad for him that he's a crap exorcist, and doesn't survive the meeting with dead guy. Four-Eyes is better at the job and explodes the evil monster with his little brother's science project. The end.

Even if you keep in mind that the Ocean Shores VCD of Escape From Coral Cove, which seems to be the only way to watch the film, has gotten rid of nearly every bit of blood, there's still no good reason for the film to be this boring. It is in fact so boring that I highly doubt that an uncut version would be more worthy of my time.

Coral Cove's prospective viewers should bring with them a love for long waterski and diving sequences and many many scenes of young healthy people presenting their bodies (in bathing suits, oh friends of nakedness) to a leering camera. Which is all nice and well but really not enough to keep one awake for more than ten minutes. Take the hour of the stuff the film provides, and you have a wonderful medicine against insomnia.

I usually try to find at least something positive to say about a film. Coral Cove doesn't make it easy, because there just isn't anything of interest to discover on screen. The direction is just there, the script easy to ignore (that's what the film's writer did, too), the acting is of the "acting" variety, so what is there to praise? Well, Leung Yuen-Jing is kinda cute, but that's not really the film's responsibility.

Oh, I know! The scene where the bad guy bleeds water! That is something to praise.

 

2 comments:

Tower Farm said...

"...many many scenes of young healthy people presenting their bodies (in bathing suits, oh friends of nakedness..."

Wow...what a waste? If anything, movie involving lots of water skiing and diving should include massive amounts of nudity.

Well...I'll be avoiding this. Thanks for the warning!
-Billy

houseinrlyeh aka Denis said...

I should probably add that there is a bit of naked diving right at the beginning, but that's all you get and doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the film.