Undertow

As a premise, this backwoods version of the Dead Calm storyline had promise.

However, director Eric Red's inability to render a convincing hurricane leads to a deluge of continuity and lighting errors.

Ultimately, the viewer is more spellbound by the bizarre weather effects than the intended storyline. Intermittent spates of ham-fisted over-direction are similarly distracting.

Charles Dance, doing an 'inbred backwoods hardass' schtick, does his best to save the movie. But ultimately, Undertow squeals like a pig ... and has more ham to boot.

This is one strange movie, because it has two great names writing and directing it, Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark) and Eric Red (The Hitcher). It's almost as if some one said: how can we make the leanest, most effective thriller? This is a movie with literally only three actors (3), no extras and the carpenters and assistant carpenters outnumber them more than 2 to 1. As well, this movie, even though it is supposedly located somewhere in "The Carolinas", is shot on location in Latvia (maybe that's why they only flew over 3 actors). This shack could have been anywhere, though, they never needed to leave Hollywood. The major problem with this movie is that the theme has been done to death (hapless traveller drives through the country side, a car breaking down and is scooped up by the locals - where have we seen that before? Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Deliverance, Children Of The Corn...). Anyway, the actors do what they can and there are some suspenseful moments, but they're not sustained until the end of the movie. Cliches abound.

Undertow (1996) is a made-for-tv crime thriller movie co-written by Kathryn Bigelow and it was actually pretty damn good.

Positives for Undertow (1996): The three performances from Lou Diamond Phillips as Jack Ketchum, Mia Sara as Willie Yates and Charles Dance as Lyle Yatesbare are pretty good. I like the setup of this movie where Phillips arrives at the cabin and gets involved in the conflict with Sara and Dance. There is some decent tension between the characters that kept building up to a nice finale. I like the chemistry between Lou Diamond Phillips and Mia Sara as they have to find a way to defeat Charles Dance, who is intimidating enough as the main antagonists. And finally, I was able to watch this movie for free on YouTube.

Negatives for Undertow (1996): This is a made-for-tv movie, so it has all of the weaknesses of those types of movies. The whole movie takes place on one set with three actors and that's you're getting from it. There is very little to nothing happening in the story aside from people just talking in a cabin. And finally, the action is very lackluster with that we see in the movie.

Overall, Undertow (1996) is a decent made-for-tv movie that is much better some other made-for-tv movies that I've seen before and you can watch this movie on YouTube.

I watched this film on Cable TV at the Sunshine Coast when my partner and I were on holidays last week. It was in the apartments we were staying at.

Overall, I love Lou Diamond Phillips and Mia Sara any-ways. Also Charles Dance, I have seen him in Alien 3 and other films..

I thought the producer / director were budget smart in making the film. Only picking 3 actors and having them on the credits (only) is somewhat clever. Plus 1 house, weapons and simplistic costumes and props.

I thought it was pretty good. As it had some suspenseful moments. Plus it focused on observational behaviour. Like what is coming next? What do we do next in this house! The camera and acting made it feel to the audience that "what would you do in a situation like this?" Be smart, and smarter...

I thought there were some techniques used in the cameras and scenes where they were quite labouring, just to give the viewer an idea or thought of what the actors were doing next. I think with some movies I have watched in the past, are similar to some styles portrayed from veteran film-makers. At least I think they tried to.

Overall 6 out of 10.

Cheers

Despite (or perhaps because of) high expectations Undertow started off as an interesting thriller but had trouble sustaining it's (relatively short) length and just didn't seem to have the pace or intensity required to carry it to it's end successfully.

Being a fan of much of writer/director Eric Red's previous work, most notably as a writer of such fine films as The Hitcher, Near dark and Blue Steel (the last two in combination with his writing partner here, Kathryn Bigelow) I was expecting a taut, suspenseful film. However while the film didn't match up to these earlier works it definitely wasn't a total waste, and on a smaller scale was a quite entertaining, if somewhat limited, experience.

Overall the acting from the three leads was quite good, with Dance's performance especially being distinctly well handled without relying on over the top histrionics, while Phillips and Sara both playing their less flashy parts solidly enough. Eric Red handles the direction well for the most part but is perhaps, if anything, a little too meandering at times in what ultimately unfolds more like a play than a film.

Probably the film's biggest fault is that much like Red's direction, the film itself is just a little too understated for the most part, and then, as is often the case with films of this nature, it tends to go from believability to stretching credibility a tad too far just for the sake of theatrics at the end, the result of which ultimately just diminishes the overall impact of what has come before.

Overall Undertow is a solid, if unremarkable thriller that definitely has it's moments, it's just that not all of those moments are as good as they could have been.

One man's opinion. 7/10