In short: The Sea Serpent (1985)

aka Hydra, the Sea Serpent

Original title: Serpiente de mar

The Sea Serpent concerns a giant sea serpent (surprise) created by an experimental H-bomb (cue five minutes or so of hilariously silly and contrived “coded” language between pilots and their home base, which does not look like a room in a military installation at all). A trio, sometimes quartet, of weirdos who witness various serpent attacks - a particularly grumpy looking Ray Milland, Timothy Bottoms, Taryn Power and Jared Martin as the on-again, off-again friend/enemy who believes Bottoms is responsible for the death of his brother only to join the fight once he finally sees the serpent as well.

If you’d tell me there were two Spanish genre directors called Amando de Ossorio, I’d absolutely want to believe you. It’s a more interesting explanation for the insanely varied quality of his work than the truth of luck, opportunity and what probably wasn’t a willingness to gilden any old crap.

Alas, this one was made by the lesser de Ossorio, so if you’re coming in expecting some moody sea serpent action, a bit – or a lot of – sleaze, and other more serious joys of a giant monster movie, you’ll be sorely disappointed. To be fair, given the quality of the sea serpent puppet, de Ossorio does his best with it, letting the adorable thing squish lighthouses or molest ships as often as he can afford it. Which, alas, isn’t all that often.

Thus much of the film has to be filled with the sort of cheap business you get up to when you have no budget for anything of visual interest and only a limited degree of imagination available. This starts with the much too long military code babble sequence and will continue through boring human interest – why the hell was the brother of Martin’s character not at least killed by the sea serpent instead of bad luck to make things at least a little less random and more dramatic? –, a conspiracy angle that makes little sense and is dropped whenever the film gets bored with it, and exciting sequences like Bottoms breaking Power out of a psychiatric clinic by putting her into a white coat and then simply wandering off with her until they encounter a guard who is beaten by some absurdly awkward flirting. An exciting giant monster movie, this is not.

Having said that, I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy my time with The Sea Serpent. There’s certainly something about the crappiness of the monster that’s more charming than annoying, and the superfluous business between the monster scenes is certainly neither clever nor relevant but also kind of fun if you’re in the mood for filler instead of a main course.

What Waits Below (1985)

The US military is planning to install some kind of secret experimental radio transmitter in cave systems somewhere below a Central American country. Unfortunately, they have two problems. Firstly, they haven't found an actual cave entrance yet, and the major responsible for this particular transmitter, Stevens (Timothy Bottoms), is running out of time to get the device up and running in time for a manoeuvre. Secondly, a merry trio of anthropologists (Richard Johnson, Anne Heywood and Lisa Blount) with a hankering for caves is poking around in the very same area the military is interested in.

To solve the situation, the uniforms call in mercenary with a side-line in caving Rupert "Wolf" Wolfsen (Robert Powell, of all people), who has been hating Stevens for good reasons ever since the Vietnam War. Thanks to the efforts of Wolf and the anthropologists whom he befriends where Steven went the antagonizing route, a cave entrance is eventually found, but soon the men posted with the transmitter are attacked by mysterious forces and disappear together with the device. It's time for a rescue expedition consisting of Wolf, the anthropologists, Stevens and some redshirts. But who or what is waiting for them below?

What Waits Below's director Don Sharp was always a dependable man whose films are generally highly competent and watchable, and who always could surprise one by detours into actual brilliance. The film at hand isn't one of the latter, and the former it will only be for viewers with a bit of patience. For unfortunately, before the film gets to its actual meat in form of the adventurous cave expedition, there's an astonishing amount of introductions, dithering, and pointless nothing to get through that really starts What Waits Below off in a bad way. It's five minutes of set-up - most of the character bits could have been fruitfully moved into the caves - drawn out over thirty minutes plus.

Once the film finally gets going it doesn't exactly turn into an affair full of fast-paced excitement, but the acting is solid, the caves and cave sets are fun to look at, and the film does some half subtle, very British clever things with the lost world tropes it uses. It's also a film that doesn't want to explain the obvious, so it never outright states that the albino people are the descendants of a much more technologically advanced people who now give a religious, or at least ritual, meaning to the artefacts their forebears left behind. It's not much but I appreciate it nonetheless.

The other element of What Waits Below I find worth mentioning is its tone. On a plot level, the film is of course another lost world adventure film but Sharp stages large parts of its running time - until the final twenty minutes or so - as if it were a horror film, milking the caves, the mysterious disappearances and the way the underground people are only glimpsed and not seen, as if this were a monster movie. It's an interesting approach, and while I wish Sharp had taken it even farther - once the underground people are really revealed, they're just not that frightening or original anymore - it's an interesting way to go about things that give What Waits Below a degree of individuality despite the well-worn ideas it uses.

Of course, the effect of the unknown terror turning into just people might very well have been a very consciously used one, even if it weakens the film's effect as a horror film and an adventure movie. It is, at the very least, not improbable to read the film as a political allegory where the sheer supernatural bogeyman we built our political enemies into turns in the end out to be not all that different from ourselves.

Which, come to think of it, is quite a daring thing to attempt in a film that starts out this boring and indifferent.

Technorati-Markierungen: reviews,british movies,adventure,fantasy,horror,don sharp,robert powell,lisa blount,anne heywood,timothy bottoms