SyFy vs. The Mynd: Dead in the Water (2018)

The all-female crew (Nikohl Boosheri, Nicole Fortuin, Bianca Simone Mannie, Skye Russell, Tanya van Graan, Christia Visser and Amy Louise Wilson) of a rust bucket of a ship is attempting to stop the illegal fishing practices of some Chinese trawler. That’s going to be their smallest problem soon enough, for when they rescue a man drifting half-dead in the water, they invite rather more direct trouble in.

As it turns out, the man is carrying something nasty an evil oil company brought up while making illegal preparations for starting on the exploitation of the Mariana Trench. Soon, paranoia and outright violence set in – their main engineer’s particularly murderous disposition certainly doesn’t help there – but fighting against the thing (cough) that got onto their ship with the stranger will eventually turn out to be more important then fighting each other.

Dead in the Water’s writer/director Sheldon Wilson is still the guy responsible for my favourite SyFy Original, Carny. While the quite considerable number of films he made for SyFy in-between hasn’t always held up to this gold standard, he is still one of the better choices when it comes to making traditional TV genre fare that isn’t infected with the cancer of “irony”. Consequently, this concoction made out of slightly rejiggered bits and pieces of infection horror and The Thing is a neat little movie, unless you turn to SyFy Originals to be blown away by their originality instead of their hopefully deft handling of well-known bits and bobs.

This one’s main claim to originality is obviously its diverse, all female except for a couple of bit parts, cast, the sort of thing that’ll have a certain type of nerd demonstrating their particular brand of heterosexual manliness by running to the hills of movies without girl cooties, or go review-bomb something like real mencowards. The rest of us will happily realize how well Wilson handles this, mainly by not making a thing at all out of his characters’ gender, letting them fulfil the functions in this genre plot in pretty much the same way male characters would. So everyone here is as competent, incompetent, emotional, calm, or violent as in pretty much every other genre film of the same style. Why, it’s as if Wilson believes women are simply people who work like other people! The cast, though not exactly full of well-known faces, handle themselves very well, which is to say, they go through the genre standards they have to handle with competence, dignity, and the calm demeanour of professionals doing their jobs.

The script is just as calm and professional as these performances, hitting the right plot beats at the right moment, and making do with what clearly must have been a tiny budget even for a SyFy Original. Production wise, this is very much “Bottle Episode: The Movie”, with a handful of sets, special effects that barely get the job done, and a pretty impoverished air.


Still, Wilson’s by now so experienced in handling this sort of thing, the resulting film is actually thoroughly entertaining, and generally suspenseful. It’s certainly not an overlooked masterpiece or anything of that sort, but it’s a fine example of straightforward genre filmmaking that’s perfectly alright with being just that.