Undertow

Jack Ketchum (Lou Diamond Phillips) loses control and crashes his car in the deep woods during a driving rainstorm. He is brought to a cabin with the Yates. Lyle Yates (Charles Dance) is a gun-totting paranoid mountain man. His woman Willie (Mia Sara) is demure and painfully quiet. A hurricane is coming to wash out everything but Lyle refuses to evacuate. Then everything gets confused like Lyle.

I watch this to see Mia Sara and also noticed the Kathryn Bigelow writing credit. It holds a bit of promise at the start as a disturbing three person play. However the movie falls apart along with everything else during the storm. LDP has always had this manufactured intensity to me. He tries to act tough rather than simply be tough especially during this time in his career. I rather have Ketchum be weaker and more of a city dweller. Lyle's craziness is too random. The romance is too abrupt and melodramatic. A simple psychological thriller turns messy and confused.

I watched this film on Cable TV at the Sunshine Coast when my partner and I were on holidays last week. It was in the apartments we were staying at.

Overall, I love Lou Diamond Phillips and Mia Sara any-ways. Also Charles Dance, I have seen him in Alien 3 and other films..

I thought the producer / director were budget smart in making the film. Only picking 3 actors and having them on the credits (only) is somewhat clever. Plus 1 house, weapons and simplistic costumes and props.

I thought it was pretty good. As it had some suspenseful moments. Plus it focused on observational behaviour. Like what is coming next? What do we do next in this house! The camera and acting made it feel to the audience that "what would you do in a situation like this?" Be smart, and smarter...

I thought there were some techniques used in the cameras and scenes where they were quite labouring, just to give the viewer an idea or thought of what the actors were doing next. I think with some movies I have watched in the past, are similar to some styles portrayed from veteran film-makers. At least I think they tried to.

Overall 6 out of 10.

Cheers

As a premise, this backwoods version of the Dead Calm storyline had promise.

However, director Eric Red's inability to render a convincing hurricane leads to a deluge of continuity and lighting errors.

Ultimately, the viewer is more spellbound by the bizarre weather effects than the intended storyline. Intermittent spates of ham-fisted over-direction are similarly distracting.

Charles Dance, doing an 'inbred backwoods hardass' schtick, does his best to save the movie. But ultimately, Undertow squeals like a pig ... and has more ham to boot.

I sat through this turkey because I hadn't seen it before, and because the premise sounded like it had potential. It was mildly entertaining until the hurricane sequence. At the height of the storm, the wind is strong enough to blow windows out of the house, yet the trees in the background are perfectly upright and not a leaf is moving! In fact, when the characters move outside the house, bright sunlight is visible illuminating the treetops. At that point, whatever credence the filmmakers had developed evaporated faster than the highly localized rain in their film. Too bad all hurricanes aren't like this one, it would surely help our homeowners insurance rates here in the Sunshine State.

This is one strange movie, because it has two great names writing and directing it, Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark) and Eric Red (The Hitcher). It's almost as if some one said: how can we make the leanest, most effective thriller? This is a movie with literally only three actors (3), no extras and the carpenters and assistant carpenters outnumber them more than 2 to 1. As well, this movie, even though it is supposedly located somewhere in "The Carolinas", is shot on location in Latvia (maybe that's why they only flew over 3 actors). This shack could have been anywhere, though, they never needed to leave Hollywood. The major problem with this movie is that the theme has been done to death (hapless traveller drives through the country side, a car breaking down and is scooped up by the locals - where have we seen that before? Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Deliverance, Children Of The Corn...). Anyway, the actors do what they can and there are some suspenseful moments, but they're not sustained until the end of the movie. Cliches abound.