Submerged

Submerged was awash with nice visuals, average acting and what promised to be an interesting plot in the beginning, but ultimately failed to deliver.

Lindsay is a seventeen-year-old girl who "sees things" in the photographs she takes. She and her sister re-locate to a quiet little town after the fiery deaths of their parents. Exploring and photographing their new surroundings, Lindsay stumbles upon an abandoned asylum and starts trying to unravel the secrets of Willow Point and her strange visions.

The flashbacks were well-done and slowly unraveled the predictable plot. Too bad the "climax" left me shaking my head and wishing I hadn't wasted 90 minutes of my time.

This Australian horror starts well, it sets the tone introduces the characters and does it all competently.

From the moment the Sick Puppies soundtrack played I became excited, this was actually delivering.

It tells the story of two sisters who move from the big city to small town Australia. One of the sisters has a "Gift" and has premonitions. When she starts seeing visions of drowned girls she sets about investigating.

Sadly by about half way through it becomes apparent that it's all going wrong. That little charm it had quickly fades to nothing and is replaced by shoddy sfx and a truly abyssmal storyline.

So I crossed my fingers and hoped for a finale that would save it, but it never came. In fact the finale is really poor and should have really had 15-30 minutes afterwards to actually finish the story.

Submerged isn't all bad, it just should have been a lot better than it turned out.

The Good:

Really quite shocking in places

Great soundtrack

The Bad:

SFX are pretty ropey

Plot falls apart badly

Seriously weak finale

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

Killing pets off is getting old, stop it

Sick Puppies should be on more movie soundtracks

As other reviewers have remarked, 'Submerged' is pretty good initially at building tension as the heroine (Roberts) begins to experience shocking supernatural encounters with apparently drowned schoolgirls (are they figments of her imagination or victims of some sinister crime), but the story soon drifts off course becoming a surrealist experiment that lacks coherency. The climax - whilst still reasonably violent - opts to forego a conventional crowd-pleasing ending for something more cerebral which might not satisfy all tastes.

Semi professional acting and cinematography although some of the location work was effective, albeit the topography didn't always match e.g. In one scene there's mangroves and then a suburban-looking creek, although it was sometimes difficult to distinguish what was being imagined vs what was reality (which I also experienced during the gaol scenes near the end when McCallum is being released).

Sometimes eerie, the film creates tension but fails to deliver tangible shocks, preferring abstract visuals to on-screen violence with a couple of minor exceptions when Roberts is being pursued at the film's climax. I wasn't always certain if what I was seeing was deliberately illogical, or just the consequence of a nano-budget and under-developed plot; there was certainly some atmosphere at times, and the main character's apparent ESP abilities was an interesting premise, but overall it had the look and feel of a student film, lacking plot detail and technical polish.

I'm only here because of the review from Rhiannon Elizabeth Irons. After reading her review, I got intrigued and found a copy to watch.

I agree with almost everything she said. The movie feels like 2 different stories merged together. The flashbacks to set the scene, don't really succeed in what they were designed to do. If anything, I'd rather watch a full-length feature about that version of Danny Miller. That version of Danny was at least interesting. What makes him tick? How far would he have gone if he wasn't caught. More so, why not show him actually torturing his victims.

When he was replaced by the older version, the film lost its serial killer spark. Rhiannon said it best when she said, "it felt like I was watching two different characters, not two actors playing the same character."

It had some good moments, but not enough to be considered engaging. The dialogue seems awkward, and the acting is rather wooden. When your supporting cast is better than your main cast you know you have problems.

Overall, the film lacks any real depth and progression. You'll watch it once and never again.

This had so much potential to be an incredible feature but its convoluted plot and anti-climatic ending left much to be desired.

This Australian horror movie starts out well, setting the scene with a solid introduction to our main characters. For a low-budget film, there is some really good character developments.

The story follows two sisters, one of which has a special gift where she can predict the future, or at least see future events/premonitions, moving to a small town after a fire killed their parents.

Intergraded with this storyline are flashbacks to a young man kidnapping and murdering two young women, drowning them - hence the title.

The two storylines come together when it is revealed the young man we've been watching murder these two young women is actually now an older man who is still hell-bent on killing. He's now talkative, where as in the flashbacks, he's been silent.

The end still confuses me and feels unsatisfying. There needed to be an additional 10-20 minutes tacked on to explain the ending. Some scenes featured in the movie could have also been cut to lower the runtime.

Acting was solid from some people involved. Ella Roberts, Ben Crawford, Richard Lovegrove, and Nicole Mazurek were standouts. Everyone else seemed to be phoning in their performances or were below average. Visuals were nice and the story moved at a good pace.

Overall, Submerged is a film that you'll watch once and easily forget. It has it's moments but not enough for it to be overly memorable. Good effort for a low-budget amateur production.