Dark Waters

If you already think the title of this user-comment is weird, just wait until you see the rest of the movie! Mariano Baino's "Dark Waters" is an old-fashioned creepy chiller and perhaps even the most underrated horror film of the last three decades. It's definitely the best Italian horror film of the nineties, along with Michele Soavi's "Dellamorte Dellamore", even though they severely differ in tone and content. The plot of "Dark Waters" is very confusing and contains an incredible amount of holes; still Biano manages to create a genuinely unsettling atmosphere and stuffs his film with nightmarish images and unlikely monsters. The beautiful Elizabeth travels back to the remote and hard-to-reach island where she spent her childhood years in a convent. Even though her mother died here and despite the fact her father advised her on his deathbed never to return, Elizabeth is drawn to the convent, more particularly to the ominous dungeons and hidden passageways. The creepy setting of "Dark Waters" reminded me a lot of "The Name of the Rose". Due to their strict and isolated life-styles, the nuns in this convent look mad and petrifying (some of them appear to be more than 150 years old!) and together they hide dark and very UN-catholic secrets. It's truly odd, but also strangely disturbing, to see nuns running around with burning torches and damaged crucifixes. "Dead Waters" also features a handful of grisly images and a fairly gruesome finale, but the film is mostly about style and atmosphere. It's practically always raining on this island, the nights seem to last twice as long as the days and even the villagers that live outside the convent look spooky. The music is very good, too, and lead actress Louise Salter is fascinating to look at. If the script had been a little more coherent and structured, this would have been a brilliant horror film. Now, it's just a very good one.

I stumbled upon this film completely by accident. I had ordered the Japanese film Dark Water and was sent this instead. The retailer told me to keep the film in order to make up for their error. It was a weird thing to have happen, and I figured it must be some cosmic sign, so I sat down to watch it having zero idea what it was about.

The plot of this film has a young woman going to a desolate monastery/nunnery in order to find out why her recently deceased father had been supporting it for years. Once there things are far from "normal" and there are many hidden dark secrets, not all of them are particularly healthy for our heroine.

This film really knocked my socks off. This is a movie that reminded me of many of the Euro-horrors of the 1970's and early 1980's. You have weird cults, young women, murder, mayhem and monsters. There is a weird tension that comes from everything being ever so slightly off center. You can't help but feel uneasy since you don't know how weird things are going to get nor do you know who is going to end up dead.

(SPOILER AHEAD) The only real problem is that even though the movie creates a very real claustrophobic world of religious oppression, with real characters, the film completely falls down in the last minutes when we see the "demon" that has been lurking around, at that point things go right into the toilet. How do I say this? Its worse than a man in a suit. it simply a rubber nightmare that almost completely ruins everything that has gone before. Simply put its on the list of really bad monster costumes. (Think about what happened at the end of the Conan the Destroyer)

If you can get past the bad monster and just take the movie for what its trying to do, then you'll enjoy the movie, if you need a perfection you'll love it up to a point and hate the ending.

I saw this first on a vhs in the mid 90s. I never understood the film then. Found it to be one helluva weird stuff. Revisited it recently after reading many glowing reviews n the cult following. Honestly, now i found it to be meh. As i mentioned in my review of the movie A Cure For Wellness that cinematography n atmosphere ain't enough to save a bad film. Apart from some solid imagery, the cathedral's location, the village, the atmosphere of constant raining n murky weather, the weird characters, the leaking cathedral with its dripping water, the cliff n the setting sun, the catacombs with their candles n the enigmatic passageways, there ain't anything good about this film. In fact, there is no music, very few dialogues n the story is really confusing. Strange things seems to happen for no reason. Its not ur typical Nunsploitation, so dont expect nudity n sex.

You've all managed to convince yourself that this is some deep work of genius, but the creator himself has admitted that he was forced to reshoot half of it by his producers and that is what resulted in this boring, incoherent mess that wasn't what he had in mind for this movie at all. Even the director of this movie has gone on record saying that the second half of this movie is crap!

Stop deluding yourselves. You're all stroking yourselves over how deep and avant garde this is, yet it was forced on a director by corporate producers looking to make this more mainstream. It's ridiculous.

Maybe it could have lived up to its potential without the interference, but that didn't happen. The reality is that this is a broken mess and a failed experiment in film-making.

Mariano Baino obviously loves Argento's 'Suspiria' and 'Inferno' and Fulci's 'The Beyond'. 'Dark Waters' is very good attempt at recreating old school Italian horror where style is more important than plot, and atmosphere rules. It isn't as flamboyant, incoherent or as gory as Argento and Fulci's most excessive movies, but that isn't such a bad thing. Personally I'm nuts about movies that deal with heresies, conspiracies, and evil nuns, so I enjoyed this creepy thriller a great deal. Recommended.