Dark Waters

This incredibly slow-paced, budgetless, and odd film is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. To call this movie "stylish" would be like calling every other movie with unsuspecting killers (i.e. nuns), crazy cults, flashbacks of terrible pasts, etc. original and great. This film is far from it. I am a big-time movie fan and rarely find myself anticipating the ending. The director needs to be a tad more upbeat and faster in certain scenes (it takes a whole minute for them to film a shot of this bizarre and meaningless fish-eating freak on a boat eat some fish!). The only thing that saved this movie was the fact that it did manage to be disturbing and quite scary at certain times, but the total opposite at other times. Dark (or Dead) Waters cannot be be called "atmospheric" just because the the low-budgeted filmmakers decided to film on a nice little beach since they probably couldn't afford a proper set with decent camera equipment. Sparked by better movies such as The Evil Dead, Dark Waters is definitely a clunker. Keep away. 2.5/10

After a lengthy journey, a woman named Elizabeth (Louise Salter) arrives at a remote, island convent, where all manner of strange and unholy things take place. This all has to do with a mysterious amulet. Elizabeth is there to discover why her late father supported the convent financially, and why he transferred this responsibility to her upon his death. What she comes to find out is that whatever is going on has nothing to do with any religion with which she is familiar.

DARK WATERS starts right off with a heavy, foreboding atmosphere full of darkness and dread. This is maintained throughout, with great use made of the crumbling, labyrinthine catacombs and candle-lit rooms. There's a definite "What if Argento had directed a Lovecraft film?" vibe to it. Well worth viewing for lovers of the macabre, the morose, and the malevolent...

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.

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.

Often the camera-work struck me as surreal, entrancing and dreamlike, picking unusual shots or showing unusual images. I think it is fair to compare this movie with some of Argento's better horror work such as Suspiria and Inferno, even though it is not at that level. Dark Waters takes its time, though, and does not at all have a rock pace like Argento, at least in spots, has in his films.

Another fair comparison might be to Fulci's Demonia, but I feel this was better than that.

There is relatively little dialogue, making this, perhaps "pure cinema." Unfortunately, what dialogue there was was sometimes very low, so that I had to keep raising and lowering the volume, possibly a flaw of the DVD copy I viewed (possibly actually a VCD, I think). However, some characters' accents were also a little difficult to decipher, and while that may have been intentional, it would have been nice to have had an option of subtitles.

Some of the characters' motivation was also mysterious to me. Are all the nuns on the same side or not? Whose side are they on? Why was Sarah different than Elizabeth? Why was the father sending money to the nuns? Where was the church located?

Despite these questions, I was very taken by the movie, and would watch it again.