Writer: Art Payne
Sunken ships! Lost treasures! Curses! Underwater sequences! Mysterious deaths! Wayne Crawford! June Chadwick! If this doesn't sound like the best thing ever (not counting the Yoshihiro Nishimura films, of course), I don't know what does. Unfortunately, The Evil Below hardly lives up to its potential. While the leads are perfectly fine, both the screenwriting and the directing are beyond pale, which all abounds to something that probably won't bore you to death, but also won't feel much more stimulating than staring at a blank wall.
Wayne Crawford plays Max Cash, the captain of a small boat that's about to be confiscated by the bank or something, because Cash hasn't paid it off yet, and he doesn't have any cash (notice the striking irony of his name in relation to his financial status). The salvation apparently comes in the (beautiful) body of June Chadwick, who rents his boat to find a mysterious sunken Spanish galleon called El diablo, which was supposedly packed to the brim with various kinds of stolen treasure.
Of course, any kind of sunken old ship with lost treasure would simply suck without an appropriate curse to go with it, so the people on the island suddenly start turning up dead, including Max Cash's father. It doesn't take Isaac Newton to observe that everyone who died was somehow involved with the hunt for the treasure and, as our heroes investigate further, it becomes more and more obvious that the origin of all the fishy things that happen is supernatural in nature. Heh, this almost sounds like a contradiction in terms.
This story is a great starting point and could have been made into a really good B-movie, hadn't the authors (almost on purpose, it seems) avoided everything that would made things more interesting. For example, they never bothered to bring an element of danger for the lead characters in the treasure hunt. The underwater scenes are okay, but it's because underwater scenes are cool by default and not because there's anything special about them here. There aren't any real elements of danger like, say, failed oxygen bottles or giant octopuses or megalodons or... well, you get the idea. The movie even lacks the almost obligatory scene where one of the heroes is kidnapped and the other one forced to go and get something from some shark infested waters.
The murder scenes are obviously not the main focus here because they are next to non-existent. We see a supporting character alone somewhere, then he or she hears something (some of them also see a shadow of something that looks like a man with a hat), then he or she sees something (but we don't) and screams and the next day he or she is dead. Where's the blood spewing, where are the cut arteries, chopped off limbs, ripped-out hearts, bellies cut open? Well, they are in Yoshihiro Nishimura movies, one of which I'm going to see tonight, but they're certainly not here.
With all this left out, the only thing left to focus on are the lead characters and their relationship. The motive of a ship captain (or, more often, a private detective) and his client falling for each other despite (or exactly because of) their totally conflicting characters has been done to death before and it calls for some witty dialogue, arguments, fighting, things to liven up the relationship a bit. Unfortunately, in this movie, even though Crawford and Chadwick look good together, they are given only the most boring and generic lines. What a waste of good actors :-(
The Evil Below is, despite my good will, a movie that's hard to recommend. You can find better underwater sequences elsewhere and you can most definitely find movies where Wayne Crawford and June Chadwick are put to better use. Try for example Forbidden World, or a more recent Art Payne - Wayne Crawford collaboration Snake Island.
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