What's with all these stupid but fancy looking made-for-TV shark movies these days? Only a couple weeks ago, I watched something awful called "Spring Break Shark Attack" in which a troop of sharks eat some college bikinis, and here's another one already, this time set in the swamps and revolving on a bull shark. Well, at least "Red Water" is slightly better than the aforementioned "Spring Break" but of course still a long way from being a good shark-thriller. Two crews of people navigate their boats down the extensive swamps of Louisiana. One crew (with Kirsty Swanson and Lou Diamond Philips on board) is on their way to drill oil, the other crew are villains (with rapper Coolio among them) looking for a lost treasure on the bottom of a lake, but all they encounter is an extremely hungry bull shark. It's rather dangerous to swim with him around, so the bad guys take the good guys (and girl) hostage and command them to dive for the money. "Red Water" features one or two well-staged action sequences and the bull shark is an interesting choice of water monster (finally something different than the Great White or Tiger Shark), but overall it's a forgettable thriller with weak performances from a washed up cast. There's no tension, a minimum of bloodshed and the underwater footage only shows brief images of a fake computer-engineered shark. The lovely Mrs. Swanson doesn't even wear on a colorful bikini, for Christ's sake, so why are we still talking about it?
