A slasher at a water park, a quick bite of comedy, and a shark-infested sequel.
AQUASLASH (2019)
Writer/director Renaud Gauthier's Aquaslash starts off like a classic slasher. A couple young people who work at the Wet Valley Water Park decide to stick around after hours and have sex in the park, but their rendezvous gets disrupted - and then they get dismembered - when someone shows up with a machete. At this point, most viewers will be sitting back and expecting to see this machete-wielding madman do a lot more stalking and slashing over the course of the film... But that's not what Gauthier delivers. Viewers will have to wait 50 minutes before the film offers any more of the sort of bloodshed slasher fans will be expecting. That's not to say no one dies in those 50 minutes, but that the movie doesn't meet slasher standards during that time.
While we wait for more slashing, we find out that Aquaslash is already slightly dated, because most of the characters are members of Valley Hills High's 2018 graduating class, and they are celebrating their graduation with a weekend-long party at the water park. Following this bunch without having to stop for a series of murder scenes allows Gauthier to make most of the movie more reminiscent of an '80s sex comedy than an '80s slasher. Young women play out their scenes in bikinis, there's a bikini car wash, breasts are bared and coated with fluorescent paint at a rave party, characters are on quests to hook up (with one of them seeking to lose his virginity).
There's a lot of character drama going on in the midst of these shenanigans. The lead character is Josh (Nicolas Fontaine), who is in a band that has been booked to perform an '80s rock set at the park (and they do perform a cover of Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night" at one point), and he has his mind set on getting back together with his ex Kimberley (Lanisa Dawn), who works at the park and is dating fellow employee Tommy (Paul Zinno). We also spend a lot of time on the complicated relationships that exist between park owner Paul (Nick Walker); his wife Priscilla (Brittany Drisdelle), who is something of a legend at Valley Hills High; Paul's wild child teenage girlfriend Alice (Madelline Harvey); and men Priscilla gets involved with, like Josh's wealthy father Michael (Howard Rosenstein).
While a focus on character is usually something to be commended, the downside of Aquaslash spending so much time on these people's personal lives is that I did not find any of them to be particularly likeable. I didn't care about their love lives, and there are so many characters running around that I occasionally felt like I was losing track of who was who. There is some important information to pick up on during all of this, but I would be surprised if any viewers will really care whether or not Josh and Kimberley are going to live happily ever after.
Something that stood out as odd to me are moments when the movie trips over its own timeline. It's set in 2018, and a park employee mentions that the park opened in the summer of 1984, which proved to be a troubled time because either multiple people were killed at the park back then or one person just happened to die there (it depends on who you ask). And yet it's also said that this is the 35th anniversary of that death / those deaths, which wouldn't happen until 2019.
For most of its running time, it would be easy to just write Aquaslash off. That 50 minute stretch has some entertainment value, sure, but there's not much in there to make the movie worth recommending. But then we reach the moment slasher fans are waiting for, and Gauthier does something more interesting and unique than just having someone run around the park with a machete. The killer in this film decides to insert criss-crossed blades into one of the water slides right before the park is going to be holding a competition that will require contestants to ride down the slides in teams. Once people start going down the slide those blades are in, Aquaslash delivers a sequence of bloodshed and insanity that lasts for several minutes, and that sequence earns the movie a recommendation. When people slam into those blades, the gore effects on display are very impressive, and the deaths in this sequence are worth the wait.
It's not often that I would recommend a movie based on one sequence, but it helps that this one is very short. It's only 71 minutes, and the end credits start rolling around the 67 minute mark. You don't have to invest much time to be rewarded with those slide kills.
The review of Aquaslash originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
DIE HART (2020)
Die Hart is a "series" that was made for the Quibi streaming service, where the shows are meant to be watched on your smartphone when you're on the go, so the episodes are all under 10 minutes. This particular show had ten episodes, and really plays like it was just a feature film that was cut up into chapters; watching it play out as presented on Quibi is basically like watching it on DVD or Blu-ray with chapter breaks.
Directed by Eric Appel from a script by Tripper Clancy and John Wick franchise writer Derek Kolstad, Die Hart stars Kevin Hart (thus the title) as himself. Tired of playing the "goofy sidekick" in action movies, Hart is out to prove that he can be a serious action star on his own. He has been offered the lead in an action movie being directed by Claude Van De Velde (Jean Reno), and to prepare for the role he enrolls in Ron Wilcox's Action Star School. This school is really just a warehouse out in the wilderness where Ron Wilcox (John Travolta) puts Hart through a series of dangerous tests that lead the actor to believe that Wilcox is a homicidal maniac who's actually trying to kill him.
Wilcox certainly is a unique character. I've heard that this role was initially offered to Bruce Willis, which makes sense given the title, and apparently Willis turned it down because he "didn't understand it". I'm surprised to hear that Willis is turning anything down at this point, but his loss is the audience's gain, because Travolta turned in a great, unhinged, really funny performance as Wilcox. Hart provides plenty of laughs along the way, we put this show on expecting that, but Travolta is really the reason to watch it.
Also in the cast are Nathalie Emmanuel as Jordan King, an actress who also attends the action school, and Josh Hartnett, making a quick appearance as himself, an action school alumni. There are so few characters in Die Hart for the majority of the "episodes" and so much of the show takes place just within the confines of the warehouse/school, it appears that they were making this as cheaply as possible, but it didn't need to be any bigger than it is. It's a lot of fun just watching Hart, Travolta, and Emmanuel - and, briefly, Hartnett - bouncing off each other in this situation.
This is the only Quibi show I've watched so far and wouldn't say that it's worth subscribing to the streaming service to see, but it's definitely one to check out if you have a free trial.
DEEP BLUE SEA 2 (2018)
For more than fifteen years after the release of the shark thriller Deep Blue Sea, rumors would come and go that Warner Bros. was thinking of getting a sequel into production. The first rumor came along in 2000, saying that the sequel would be called Deep Red Sea and would find a heavily armed rescue team battling genetically engineered sharks while trying to save people from a skyscraper hotel that was knocked over into the ocean by an earthquake. Around 2010, writer/director Jack Perez nearly made a direct-to-video Deep Blue Sea 2 that would have been about Navy SEALs trying to eliminate pirates that had taken over a scientific research ship, which happened to contain water tanks and tunnels inhabited by sharks that had been surgically altered to add weapons like machine guns and torpedoes to their bodies. The cancellation of Perez's sequel was an accounting decision that Warner Bros. made in response to lagging DVD sales. The money situation clearly changed since then, because in 2018 we did get a direct-to-video Deep Blue Sea 2, but Perez's idea was left on the shelf.
The challenge to making a follow-up to Deep Blue Sea is the fact that all of the film's genetically manipulated, super smart mako sharks had been destroyed by the end, so a sequel would have to introduce other sharks - in fact, Warner Bros. told Perez that the only element that needed to be carried over into part 2 was the concept of sharks being experimented on. The sharks in his script were from an entirely different experiment, they had no connection to the makos in the first movie. That's the same approach that director Darin Scott and screenwriters Hans Rodionoff, Jessica Scott, and Erik Patterson took to the part 2 we actually got. That's fine, but they also made the questionable decision to just turn Deep Blue Sea 2 into a sub-par remake of the first movie. The sequel is just the first movie all over again, but a lot cheaper and not nearly as entertaining.
Again we have unscrupulous, ill-advised experiments being conducted on sharks in underwater labs out at sea; in this case the labs are at a place called the Akheilos Complex, and Carl Durant (Michael Beach) of Durant Pharmaceuticals is enhancing the intelligence of five bull sharks as a lead-in to his plan to enhance the intelligence of human beings so our species can stay ahead of A.I. and prevent machines from taking over the world. This explanation is just an excuse to get to smart, man-eating shark action, but it still comes off as really ridiculous. Especially since Durant is getting hopped up on his own goofballs here, and when he takes a hit of intelligence enhancer we see computerized DNA symbols flash across the screen.
Characters explain why the mako sharks of the first movie have been replaced by bull sharks; they say bull sharks are the most lethal of all sharks, with a bite ten times that of a great white. Once the sharks cause Akheilos Complex to start flooding, the characters have more than five of them to deal with, too. One of the sharks gives birth, and the little baby sharks come riding in on the flood waters. The presence of the baby sharks is the one thing that makes Deep Blue Sea 2 stand out from the first movie (aside from its mediocrity), as there weren't any babies in the first movie. These little things are reminiscent of the flesh-eating fish from the Piranha movies. Aside from adding them in, Scott and the writers seem to have been content with replaying famous moments from the previous film.
Viewers will be hard pressed to care about any of the characters who are trying to escape from the flooding, shark-filled complex. None of them are very interesting or likeable, although Danielle Savre's character Misty Calhoun is clearly our heroine, since she's a shark conservationist who immediately objects to Durant's experiments when she's invited to the complex to serve as a consultant.
There are definitely worse shark movies out there, but the only reason to watch Deep Blue Sea 2 is to see the baby sharks.
For more than fifteen years after the release of the shark thriller Deep Blue Sea, rumors would come and go that Warner Bros. was thinking of getting a sequel into production. The first rumor came along in 2000, saying that the sequel would be called Deep Red Sea and would find a heavily armed rescue team battling genetically engineered sharks while trying to save people from a skyscraper hotel that was knocked over into the ocean by an earthquake. Around 2010, writer/director Jack Perez nearly made a direct-to-video Deep Blue Sea 2 that would have been about Navy SEALs trying to eliminate pirates that had taken over a scientific research ship, which happened to contain water tanks and tunnels inhabited by sharks that had been surgically altered to add weapons like machine guns and torpedoes to their bodies. The cancellation of Perez's sequel was an accounting decision that Warner Bros. made in response to lagging DVD sales. The money situation clearly changed since then, because in 2018 we did get a direct-to-video Deep Blue Sea 2, but Perez's idea was left on the shelf.
The challenge to making a follow-up to Deep Blue Sea is the fact that all of the film's genetically manipulated, super smart mako sharks had been destroyed by the end, so a sequel would have to introduce other sharks - in fact, Warner Bros. told Perez that the only element that needed to be carried over into part 2 was the concept of sharks being experimented on. The sharks in his script were from an entirely different experiment, they had no connection to the makos in the first movie. That's the same approach that director Darin Scott and screenwriters Hans Rodionoff, Jessica Scott, and Erik Patterson took to the part 2 we actually got. That's fine, but they also made the questionable decision to just turn Deep Blue Sea 2 into a sub-par remake of the first movie. The sequel is just the first movie all over again, but a lot cheaper and not nearly as entertaining.
Again we have unscrupulous, ill-advised experiments being conducted on sharks in underwater labs out at sea; in this case the labs are at a place called the Akheilos Complex, and Carl Durant (Michael Beach) of Durant Pharmaceuticals is enhancing the intelligence of five bull sharks as a lead-in to his plan to enhance the intelligence of human beings so our species can stay ahead of A.I. and prevent machines from taking over the world. This explanation is just an excuse to get to smart, man-eating shark action, but it still comes off as really ridiculous. Especially since Durant is getting hopped up on his own goofballs here, and when he takes a hit of intelligence enhancer we see computerized DNA symbols flash across the screen.
Characters explain why the mako sharks of the first movie have been replaced by bull sharks; they say bull sharks are the most lethal of all sharks, with a bite ten times that of a great white. Once the sharks cause Akheilos Complex to start flooding, the characters have more than five of them to deal with, too. One of the sharks gives birth, and the little baby sharks come riding in on the flood waters. The presence of the baby sharks is the one thing that makes Deep Blue Sea 2 stand out from the first movie (aside from its mediocrity), as there weren't any babies in the first movie. These little things are reminiscent of the flesh-eating fish from the Piranha movies. Aside from adding them in, Scott and the writers seem to have been content with replaying famous moments from the previous film.
Viewers will be hard pressed to care about any of the characters who are trying to escape from the flooding, shark-filled complex. None of them are very interesting or likeable, although Danielle Savre's character Misty Calhoun is clearly our heroine, since she's a shark conservationist who immediately objects to Durant's experiments when she's invited to the complex to serve as a consultant.
There are definitely worse shark movies out there, but the only reason to watch Deep Blue Sea 2 is to see the baby sharks.
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