The Evil Below (1988)

Directed by: Jean-Claude Dubois

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.

Cheerleader Camp (1988)

Directed by: John Quinn

Writers: David Lee Fein, R.L. O'Keefe

From David Fein and R.L. O'Keefe, the brilliant minds that brought us... well, nothing, comes this extraordinary tale of, you wouldn't guess it in a million years, a cheerleader camp (!) Admittedly, a story about the place where cheerleaders train for their cheerleading might've been a little boring without being spiced up with a bit of something extra, like for example a murderous maniac on a rampage, or steamy lesbian orgies, or (preferably) both. Well, orgies are unfortunately out, but a maniac is there, so there's at least one good thing about those cheerleaders - they die.

 

The story takes place in, brace yourselves, a cheerleader camp (!) somewhere in the woods. I have no idea what that place is supposed to be and how it works, since the sound was too bad for me to understand most of the dialogue, not that I feel a terrible loss about that. Apparently, some cheerleaders are there either to learn to cheerlead, or to have some kind of cheerleading competition, so there's an expected large collection of cheap bimbos, in addition to which we also have some equally useless male characters, like a fat prankster bastard with a camera, an inept sheriff, the lead heroine's stupid annoying horny boyfriend etc. The least bad moments in the movie were the deaths of these losers.

After the first few bodies are found, they are considered suicides, so the party doesn't stop. We wouldn't want a few minor deaths get in the way of the cheerleading, would we? This means that the characters continue to ignore the killer's presence, giving him the opportunity to increase the score (i.e. body count) without much effort, but it also means that the murders are not shown. Unfortunately, this lack of explicit violence continues deep into the film and poses a serious problem for the movie's integrity. Instead, the director chose to torture us with the lead character's nightmares, which are repetitive, boring and serve absolutely no purpose, except as a setup for the final plot twist, which is simply "meh".

The opening credits look as if freshly stolen from a John Carpenter movie, unfortunately, all similarities end there. This is not Halloween, and the lack of violence (and orgies) is not in any way compensated by tension, uneasiness or anything similar. Boredom is the dominating feeling and the movie is saved from being completely unwatchable only by the two wonderful leads, played by Betsy Russell (Saw III, IV, and so on) and Lucinda Dickey (who played one of the lead roles in Ninja III: The Domination, even though I haven't mentioned it in the review of that movie). Seeing those two beautiful ladies warmed my heart and made all the crap (which comprises pretty much everything else in the movie) almost bearable, but it's still not enough to recommend anything but avoiding this title.

Snake Eater (1988)

Directed by: George Erschbamer

Writers: Michael Paseornek, John Dunning

 

 

 

I have a confession to make: I had a movie blog before this one. In fact, I had tons of (crappy) blogs before this one, but the one I'm talking about is the one I actually liked. It was supposed to be about people who can kick your ass (like Lorenzo Lamas, Richard Norton, etc., leaving out the obvious ones like Chuck Norris or Arnie) and the reviews were pretty detailed and full of pictures. Of course, this was too much for me, putting those pictures was a real pain and it took me hours to update the damn thing each time. So I took a few months off and decided to create a different kind of blog, with shorter texts and without pictures, and also with a bit broader field of interest, which gives me the opportunity to update more frequently and ensure my readers (both of them) visit it regularly.

 

Still, I kinda like some of my old texts, so for the sake of completeness I'm gonna reprint them here, without the pictures. First, we're gonna cover Lorenzo Lamas' Snake Eater trilogy. The first movie was originally reviewed here: http://speedtavern.blogspot.com/2011/09/snake-eater-1988.html

 

And here goes the original text (click on the link above to see some screenshots):

 

 

 

This is the first part of a trilogy in which Lorenzo Lamas plays Jack “Soldier” Kelly, a former member of the Marines, currently a cop whose job is to look cool, make the women around him take their clothes off, deliver one-liners so devastating they would make Arnie blush and occasionally beat up some bad guy. In this movie he faces a band of Deliverance-style rednecks who killed his parents and kidnapped his sister, but we will get there in a moment.

First things first – the Snake Eaters are an elite division of the Marines whose speciality are actually the search & destroy missions and not something else that might have crossed your dirty mind. I’ll be first to admit that this was a relatively poor choice of words on the screenwriters’ part – they couldn’t theoretically have made it more gay, unless they’d named them Village People. And that one was already taken. Anyway, this is actually not that important, because, as I said earlier, Lorenzo is a former Snake Eater. The only thing that reminds us of his past is his belt buckle, which has a drawing of a snake on it. Apart from that, we are pleased to announce that Lorenzo doesn’t eat any snakes in any of the three movies.

Okay, anyway – the very beginning of the movie shows us a disastrous drug bust led by Lorenzo that got him suspended. Without going into too much detail, I will mention that we get to see a naked woman (she had to remove her clothes to show that she’s not wired, but she required the same of Lorenzo and he did it, but fortunately he kept his snake offscreen) and a general Dirty Harry attitude that drives his character. At the same time, said rednecks kill his parents and kidnap his sister with every intention of doing reeeaaally nasty things to her, like raping and stuff, but they never get around to that because something always interrupts. You would imagine they’d have some privacy deep in the woods, but no.  

Lorenzo doesn’t act in this one – he simply revels in his own coolness and generally keeps the same don’t-give-a-crap-gonna-kick-your-ass face expression throughout the movie, except for the very moment when he learns of the tragedy, when he looks down in sadness for about a second, but he gets back on the track really quickly.

Unfortunately, his self-confidence isn’t always followed by his actions. Of course, he did save the girl, but he also got himself into trouble far too many times, definitely more than someone of his reputation should allow. For example, the very first time he meets the rednecks, he starts a fight with them and gets heavily beaten (and there are only three of them!). He also steps into a bear trap, he gets shot etc., but luckily none of that does him any noticeable damage.

Snake Eater is a pretty good movie. It actually started great – the drug bust was really hilarious and after that we had a few juicy fistfights, all of that enriched with Lorenzo’s one-liners; unfortunately, things got a little quiet in the middle, with him trying stealth tactics to infiltrate the rednecks lair and all that, which was kinda gay. Also, the rednecks were totally inept and never managed to get any of the women to take their clothes off, which was a bit frustrating. Lorenzo, on the other hand, spends virtually the entire movie shirtless. Still, there’s enough action and humor to keep you entertained, so I would wholeheartedly recommend this one to all you B-movie lovers out there.