Águas Escuras

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.

It's best to walk into Dark Waters knowing that it's going to be an exercise of style over substance. As great and moody as the atmosphere of this movie is, the story itself is murky and hard to pin down. As best as I can tell, it's about a young woman whose father dies and she visits a strange island monestary that her father had been sending money to for years. Once she gets there, she gets the feeling that she's very unwelcome and she might unearth some truths that are better left buried.

One thing Dark Waters gets right is the atmosphere. If I didn't know any better, I'd truly believe this was a film shot in the mid-70's by some Italian horror master. It's beautifully shot with so much attention to detail. It's just a shame that the script didn't seem to have as much thought put into it. At one point, the lead character is attacked by a psychotic nun and she reacts to this as if she's just stubbed her toe. There's no sense of urgency at all. Wouldn't someone who'd just been attacked want to get out of there as soon as possible?

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.

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