Águas Escuras

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.

This is not an easy movie to track down, but if you can find it, grab it.

Dark Waters (aka Dead Waters) is a great example of how atmosphere alone can make a movie work. The plot is a little confusing but trust me, you will not care. This movie is a nightmare to rival any that H.P. Lovecraft wrote down.

On a remote island in the Black Sea, there is a convent, a primitive stone fortress without electricity, virtually cut off from the rest of the world. The island is a grim, unlovely place, seemingly made up of stones and dead fish with nary a palm tree in sight. Our young heroine Elizabeth arrives on this island alone. Elizabeth is an orphan; her mother died in childbirth and her father has recently passed away. Elizabeth now wants to know why he had spent his life secretly sending good amounts of money to the convent. The nuns, a grim and sour looking lot, (not so very different from most Catholic nuns I have known) led by a blind and gravel-voiced Mother Superior, give her no straight answers, but allow Elizabeth to stay with them for the time being. Elizabeth begins having horrific nightmares, and this is where the movie really succeeds in frightening its viewers. The nightmares are truly terrifying, particularly the one in which a crucified SOMETHING approaches the camera as though on a track, opens its mouth and simply emits the most hideous, inhuman howl ever heard. It sounds like a long lost beast stuck in a tar pit, and gave me the creeped out shivers for days afterwards.

Elizabeth is befriended by a young, sweet tempered nun named Sarah, who tries to help her escape from the island. But of course, there is no escape. The answers she came looking for at the convent are all there, and too late, she learns that some things are better unknown. The truth about her birth, her mother and her identity come out in a shocking (and, unfortunately, somewhat rushed) finale with a twist that I truly had not seen coming...and I thought I'd seen them all. The only complaint I had? I wanted to see more of the monster. The glimpse I got of it showed me a bug eyed, razor mouthed THING straight out of a Lovecraftian primordial soup. But it didn't last nearly long enough.

This is a good, creepy film to watch with all the lights off, if you dare. It may move too slow for some, but if you like genuinely spooky films, lots of dark, rainy atmosphere and the cold, slimy unknown, you'll like this one.

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.

A young woman travels to a mysterious, unnamed island to find out why her belated father funded a strange monastery.

Dark Waters has disappeared off the planet. I wouldn't have known about it had I not read Mark Kermode's autobiography. I'm also a fan of the Tartan Video and they put out this one as a limited VHS release in 1995. Dark Waters is similar in style to the Italian Giallo films, especially the more atmospheric ones. It reminded me a bit of early Mario Bava and Soavi's The Church. The film is very atmospheric with excellent lighting and cinematography which hide its small budget. The film has drawn comparisons to Lovecraftian fiction with its use of religious themes, the unknown and suspicion of outsiders. There's further comparisons to be made to The Wicker Man. Dark Waters gets jumbled up in it storytelling and becomes lost in its own ambiguity. This is a film were a longer running time would be beneficial to iron out some of the creases.

Dark Water is a stylish and interesting horror film with some scares and some strong violence. Sadly the plot is messy and the brief bloody scenes can't save what is effectively Giallo-lite. The film is not some hidden gem or lost masterpiece. It's an above average stylish horror film that came out at a time when the market was over saturated with Straight-To-Video slashers. The film has had a Blu-Ray release which features a nice albeit soft matte picture and crisp, clean sound. There's also a rare 2-disc DVD with a replica of the stone amulet.