Blood in the Water

Saw says hello Jaws, what big teeth you have. All the better to eat you with Saw. So yeah they're trying to capture something with Saw and Jaws like tendencies. Those two movies are orders of magnitude better than this film. I mean Jaws has so much to offer as a movie even without the actual shark attack parts. The build up, the story, the characters, it's all there. Jaws is a really classic movie that should be experienced several times to fully appreciate it. The Saw movies are quite extraordinary in what they did too. Not quite up there with Jaws but as horror movies they were pretty good movies. You find yourself going hell yeah when someone gets it. It makes you feel something, even if it's only blood lust and revenge fantasies. This movie Blood in the Water is just appalling bad. It's an insult to Jaws and Saw to give it the tag line Jaws meets Saw or whatever it is they're claiming. It's dull as dishwater with some really bad acting. People just recite their lines with zero emotional content included. There are sections of swearing which do nothing to add drama or grit. It's like they couldn't think of coherent sentences to write so they filled it up with swearing. I just found the movie really lacking in any merit. There is nothing enjoyable about the film. It's really not worth your time to watch this film.

That's an insult to both "Saw" and "Jaws". To be honest it's an insult to "Jaws the revenge" and that's a difficult movie to insult.

First scene a guy tries to cut through a metal shackle with prunning shears. So you already know this is going down hill quickly.

Bad acting, terrible script, horrendous direction and if this movie had an editor it was only in name as they clearly didn't actually do any work.

Dismissed.

After awakening from being abducted, a woman joins others in a special pool where they're forced to reveal secrets they all hold which binds them together that ends up requiring them to be fed to a killer shark if they fail the game, requiring them to work together to find out how to get away.

Overall, this was a rather interesting if flawed genre effort. Among the more enjoyable features here is the film's initial concept of integrating sharks into a highly unusual setup. The melding together of the genres by forcing a group of strangers chained together in one location who are forced to recall details of a crime that tied them together with the shark showing up to kill them off adds a rather dynamic flair to be had here. This is all given a bit more seriousness than it really needs with the clandestine abductions showing off the purposes of the group being targeted and how it all ties together which at the least is interesting. That gives the film a decent setup to hang incredibly cheesy genre attacks on. The premise of this one allows for the rather goofy nature of the struggling victim being overwhelmed and dragged underwater in a swarm of activity that is far more effective than it should be given the use of the prosthetic shark head for the attacks. Their infrequent placement comes off quite nicely to help pump up the running time outside of the arguments that emerge even though that highlights the utterly unimpressive shark prop that gives itself away every chance it can which isn't too big of a deal but is all that holds this one up. There are some big flaws here that hold this one down. The main issue here is the utterly unbelievable and unrealistic scenario which strains credibility to the point of agony. The whole idea of managing to capture a Great White Shark and sneak it into an indoor swimming pool that would exist in a random backyard strains incredulity to a breaking point rarely seen in the genre as this premise is so hard to logically work out and believe that the film is nearly doomed from the start. The pacing is way too uneven with too many scenes of them arguing with each other in between the shark attacks that become dull after a while, and alongside the general cheapness of everything leaves this one a highly underwhelming feature.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence.

If I had to rate each category, it would go like this:

Acting: 7 Color: 1 Special Effects: 0 Plot Twists: 0 Scenery: 1 (the whole movie is a pool) Story Line: 5 (it's been done so many times before)

Wow. Just wow!

Granted, I must admit first and foremost that I wasn't harboring a single expectation to this 2022 movie from writers Matthew B. C. and Dominic Ellis. Why? Well, the movie's synopsis didn't exactly scream high end movie experience. But still, I do believe in giving a movie a fair chance, and so I did. And this is a shark movie after all.

But as expected, really, then "Blood in the Water" is a bad movie, a really, really bad movie. I mean, if you take "Saw" and throw in a great white shark in a swimming pool, then you have "Blood in the Water". And I am not kidding. Yeah, that was the extend of the writing skills of Matthew B. C. and Dominic Ellis. So director Dominic Nutter wasn't really given much to work with.

The storyline was utter rubbish, as it was essentially just a poor mans watered down version of "Saw", but with an added pool that has a great white shark in it. Man, talk about a lousy concept. And it wasn't made much better with the shark being able to growl all menacingly. Nay, that was just laughable.

The acting performances in the movie were as sluggish and amateurish as the movie itself, so at least that went hand in hand.

This movie is a waste of time, money and effort, so don't even bother. In fact, the movie's cover/poster was actually the best part of the entire ordeal, and the cover wasn't even a proper representation of the contents of the movie.

My rating of "Blood in the Water" lands on a one out of ten stars.