Red Water

In Louisiana, the fisherman John Sanders (Lou Diamond Phillips) is near to lose his boat to the bank when his ex-wife Kelli Raymond (Kristy Swanson) that works in environment research and the arrogant son of her boss Gene Bradley (Gideon Emery) offer an amount for him to help their company in a drilling operation in the river. Meanwhile a freshwater shark is attacking people in the area. When they arrive in the site, they see an anchored boat and they believe that belong to their competitors from the Global Oil Company. However they are dangerous criminals that are seeking a large amount of stolen money that is hidden in the bottom of the river. Gene confronts the mobsters and the group is threatened by the gangsters.

"Red Water" is a forgettable adventure with the usual flaws and clichés of B-movies of the genre. Kristy Swanson is very sexy and beautiful and I did not recognize her. The scene of a hiking group near a bridge is totally out of the context and ridiculous. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "Rio Sangrento" ("Bloody River")

Starts out badly with stereotypical characters, awful acting and terrible CGI. The acting does improve slightly, so gave it an additional star. Disappointing that Coolio, having sang Gangsta's Paradise, was as a terrible gangster. LOL!

What's with all these stupid but fancy looking made-for-TV shark movies these days? Only a couple weeks ago, I watched something awful called "Spring Break Shark Attack" in which a troop of sharks eat some college bikinis, and here's another one already, this time set in the swamps and revolving on a bull shark. Well, at least "Red Water" is slightly better than the aforementioned "Spring Break" but of course still a long way from being a good shark-thriller. Two crews of people navigate their boats down the extensive swamps of Louisiana. One crew (with Kirsty Swanson and Lou Diamond Philips on board) is on their way to drill oil, the other crew are villains (with rapper Coolio among them) looking for a lost treasure on the bottom of a lake, but all they encounter is an extremely hungry bull shark. It's rather dangerous to swim with him around, so the bad guys take the good guys (and girl) hostage and command them to dive for the money. "Red Water" features one or two well-staged action sequences and the bull shark is an interesting choice of water monster (finally something different than the Great White or Tiger Shark), but overall it's a forgettable thriller with weak performances from a washed up cast. There's no tension, a minimum of bloodshed and the underwater footage only shows brief images of a fake computer-engineered shark. The lovely Mrs. Swanson doesn't even wear on a colorful bikini, for Christ's sake, so why are we still talking about it?

Channel 5 broadcast this immediately after showing the 2010 version of PIRANHA . This is very lazy transmission but you can see the thematic logic of this . What it does mean is that a film like RED WATER comes off second best compared to a in your face comedy horror spoof because this is a very conventional , flat movie featuring a killer shark

RED WATER gets off to a fairly good start . You want to grab an audience's attention? Well what better way to grab every man's attention by having a couple of cuties swimming in a lake wearing very skimpy bikinis . Even better a couple of minutes later the action cuts to a bad guys swimming pool where some really hot women walk around in bikinis . The board on this page has a few comments noticing this somewhat cynical crowd pleasing scene and all state this is in fact the best part of the film . You got hot chicks in bikinis and it's the best part of the film ? Yes it says a lot about the movie you're watching

No matter how many hot chicks you can cram in to a movie you'd better have a story to go with it and how many great films have you seen featuring sharks that weren't directed by Steven Spielberg ? You'd also do well to remember RED WATER is one of those made for television movies so goes out of its way not to offend the audience . Example ? Someone gets eaten by a shark and a verbal reaction to this scene of horror is " Damn "

Then again, I think that just about anything Lou Diamond Phillips does is good. THAT is a true fan, in my opinion. The shark looked very real...even moreso than the one in the "Jaws" movies. Granted, there was a substantial amount of blood and gore, but it was a horror movie so that's to be expected. There still wasn't as much of that in "Red Water" as there was in "Jaws" (any of them). OK, that's all of my "review"...Now I have to ramble to make up the 10 line minimum...lol! As I said before, NOTHING Mr. Phillips does (in my opinion) is bad or something I wouldn't want to watch again, so maybe I'm not really the right person to review any of his movies...lol!