La fosa del Diablo

My review was written in July 1989 after watching the film on Raedon video cassette.

This routine South African-lensed thriller about legendary evil scares up little interest in its video release.

Comfortable team of Wyane Crawford and June Chadwick go diving for a treasure ship that sank in 1683. They encounter rivals for the booty, as well as shark attacks and lots of local talk about "the devil walks on this island". Incoherent nightmares pad out the running time. Lack of a decent budget puts the kibosh on this one.

It's ho-hum low adventure. Crawford is okay in his typical ne-er-do-well action role.

They sure loved their aquatic Sci-Fi/horror tales at the end of the 80s! In less than two years, no less than six similarly themed movies were unleashed upon cult-loving audiences. Of course, of all those, only James Cameron's "The Abyss" is a REALLY good film, and the other five vary from mediocre to abysmal. "Deepstar Six" and "The Rift" are titles I proudly rank among my guilty pleasures, but together with the horrendous "Lords of the Deep", this "The Evil Below" is the worst of the worst.

It's an indescribably tedious and uninteresting story of a hermit boat captain in the Caribbean teaming up with a mysterious woman to search for a sunken 17th century Spanish galleon named El Diablo. The ship supposedly still hides great treasures, but it's protected by supernatural forces and whoever tries to enter it unleashes a curse. Or something like that, at least, I must admit I wasn't paying attention the whole time. This is clearly more of an adventure flick than a horror movie, and it's even worse if they are boring. None of the characters, good or villainous, are worth mentioning and even the underwater footage isn't the least bit remarkable.

The VHS cover for The Evil Below makes it look like a cool underwater horror flick. Sadly it's closer to a boring adventure flick and has no real horror elements. It starts off with some divers who get attacked and we see a bit of blood, but that's the only blood in the entire film.

The Evil Below isn't the worst around, but for a horror film it is tediously boring. The acting is decent and to be honest the only thing that keeps you watching is the developing romance between the two leads. There's a few nightmare sequences where it just seems like the director didn't know what to do. I manged to sit through it all (just about) but I wouldn't recommend this film to ANYONE. Horror fans might want a copy for the cool VHS cover, but it's best left at that.

This underwater adventure rode the wave of waterlogged films coming out in 1989 (THE ABYSS, DEEP STAR SIX, LEVIATHAN, THE RIFT, LORDS OF THE DEEP, etc.). While the excellent cover sells the horror aspect, the film is closer to THE DEEP with treasure diving adventure taking up a majority of the running time. Horror elements do pop up though in the form of black magic, a big killer eel and a undead protagonist (who is never really explained). Stars Wayne Crawford of JAKE SPEED fame as the equally bizarre named Max Cash. Crawford is pleasant enough and somehow he ends up the object of every woman's affection in the film. How did he manage that? Oh yeah - he directed it! I guess that is as good as reason as any.

This movie was a total yawnfest that took forever to get going, but never really did. It was simply boring to watch, so much in fact I could just never really get into it. This movie is not a horror movie by an stretch of the imagination, the cover of the videotape made it out to be one. Instead it is a thriller type movie with a few elements of horror thrown in as to make the movie more interesting. Of course, it does not help this movie at all. Mostly all I remember is that this movie was kind of like a movie from the 1970's called "The Deep". Bunch of people looking for treasure, rival groups that sort of thing. There are supernatural twists in it too, but to tell you the truth I was so bored when watching this movie that I kind of zoned out so I can not really tell you what the supernatural elements were. I kind of remember footprints on the bottom of the sea so maybe it was some sort of walking dead, or that may be me thinking of Lucio Fulcio's "Zombie" movie instead as that one was a horror movie that was set in a tropical island and as outlandish as that one was it was a lot more entertaining than this movie. That day we learned a valuable lesson, never rent a movie based on its cover art.