NUNS ON AN ISLAND ARE UP TO NO GOOD
★★☆☆☆ (Don’t Bother)
Director: Mariano Baino
1993
A beautiful woman named Elizabeth (Louise Salter) travels the stormy seas and arrives on a small island, where a monastery lords over the few inhabitants. She’s looking for her missing friend, whose alarming last letter alluded to witchery and crimes perpetrated by the nuns. Elizabeth is also there to see if she should continue her dead father’s donations, and this means the women of the cloth roll out the red carpet and give their visitor a room and a lackey named Sarah (Venera Simmons). Elizabeth decides this gloomy, cavernous castle with no electricity would be a great place to hang her hat while she digs into her ancestry (her family once lived on the island), despite dead bodies and creepy nuns performing rituals on a hill with crosses like they’re the Klu Klux Klan. I believe we’re supposed to consider our heroine to be tough for staying, but really, this only makes her out to be a fool. The ending is full of magnificent gore and practical effects, but the only thing sinister about Dark Waters is that Baino believed we would buy a self-aware protagonist waiting around to be slaughtered.
Dark Waters (also known as Dead Waters) wants to be meaningful, but it is like an Ingmar Bergman movie without nuance—a series of images resembling a college art film that bores you to tears. A shore full of dead fish is shown to us and we’re supposed to interpret this like we’re supposed to interpret every pompous shot (the fish are meant to represent sheeple Christians killing themselves for their religion, or are a warning that the dark lord is coming), but it’s in service of a nothing script. Once Elizabeth arrives to find her friend, their bond is an afterthought as she feels trapped in her new room (she is free to leave) and questions why blood covers the floor of the catacombs (she is free to leave), making Dark Waters one of those films that defies logic and reason from our heroine. The story takes place in modern times, we know police exist. We know that if we see nuns carrying a murder victim in the shadowy night, we will find a way to leave at that moment, not the end, when Elizabeth decides to take a ferry she discovers will never arrive. Dark Waters isn’t helped by Salter, who looks like she’s in a supermodel coma throughout most of the film.
SPOILERS I’m not trying to insult anyone, but this is the most Lucio Fulci movie Fulci never made, at least when it comes to plot points, the few striking visuals and angles, and cinematography. His quirks are all here. Vital characters are introduced halfway though the film; there are strange nuns going blind and hints to a bigger mystery that culminates in a wet blanket resolution before going off the rails. What I liked about Dark Waters were the intriguing clues to Elizabeth’s roots. We’re told that her birth was controversial, and that it might have something to do with the devil or the monastery itself, and if you continue to watch, it will be because you also want to know more about where she came from. The bones of the story have promise but the flesh is weak. I suppose if you dabble in Catholicism or religions in general, you won’t regret giving this movie a chance.
Dark Waters is a haughty film that believes in its importance right up to the moment a woman exposes her gargoyle boobs (she should hang out with that lady from Mausoleum) and wiggles them around while a large vagina threatens our heroine from behind a cave’s hidey hole. Yes, we get it, females are the root of all evil. This gross showdown is by far the best part of the film, but you might be asleep by the time the climax rolls around. Dark Waters could be considered a “woman’s project”, only it invents weaknesses and puts the blame on our sex for, well, everything. All while making it our responsibility to save the world. Take Adam’s rib and shove it.
GENRES: Atmospheric, Body Horror, Psychological
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