Fear Below

“Wamba.”

I think the best part of my Summer Shark Fest Extravaganza is that it lets me find and watch movies that I would have completely missed otherwise. Movies that I had never heard of before, and yet still deserve some attention.

As I continue my yearly survey of shark movies, I’ve discovered that they fall into a few general categories. You have movies that are about the shark. It is the main threat, and the movie falls apart without it. Movies like Jaws or The Shallows fall into the first category. It’s what most people think of when they think of the genre.

You have the rare, albeit very fun, category of movies where a serial killer uses a shark as a weapon. The shark is an integral part of the plot, but the main antagonist is the human killer. Notably, this includes Shark Night 3D, as well as another movie I’ll be covering at the end of the month.

The third category, and the one that Fear Below belongs to, is when the shark is almost incidental. It’s still a threat, of course, but you can remove it and still have a functional plot. It’s not the main thing driving the conflict. In 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, the bigger issue was that they were trapped in an underwater cave with a dwindling air supply and no one knew how to find them.

In Fear Below, the bigger issue is that they’re held hostage by gangsters who will almost certainly kill them once they’re done retrieving the stolen gold bullion from the bottom of the river. The fact that there is also a very large, very aggressive, pregnant bull shark in the water is just the icing on the cake.

Actually, that’s more like the sprinkles on top of the icing. The icing is that the movie takes place in 1946, so our protagonists don’t even have modern scuba diving gear.

I have seen period pieces in the genre before, but those were always centered around real events, like the 1916 Jersey Shore attacks or the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. This is the first time I’ve seen an entirely fictional one, and I want more.

Visually, the movie is distinct. Between the costuming and the riverside setting, it doesn’t look like anything else. It’s beautiful, too. Instead of the cold blues of the ocean, we have the warmer yellows of the river. It’s gloomy with almost no visibility, and the trees scattered along the bottom just loom out of the murk.

There were several moments where you can just barely see something moving behind the characters. A dark shape. A flash of white. The camera never calls attention to it, but it made me keep an incredibly sharp eye on the background. You really don’t need much to build tension. I did more than half the work myself, and I’m pretty sure that some of the things I “saw” weren’t really there.

The diving gear aided the tension, too. Yes, a diver always feels vulnerable on a fundamental level. But at least a scuba tank is self-contained. It’s very different from having a bulky suit, a helmet with a tiny window to see out of, and an air hose that someone on land needs to manually crank in order to maintain a flow of pressurized air through. Honestly, just the air hose alone is nightmare worthy. There are so many things that it could get caught on, and if it unplugs for any reason, you’re screwed. If someone on shore doesn’t do their job, you’re screwed.

And there’s always an underlying threat that something bad might happen on shore because, again, there are very hostile gangsters there!

You almost don’t even need the shark, but I am very glad that they had it. According to my research, it was done entirely practically through props and miniatures. We don’t get to see a lot of the shark, but what we do see looks excellent and very realistic. This is probably the best looking shark out of all the movies I’ve covered by a sizable margin. (Outside of Open Water, of course, which used actual, living sharks.)

It behaves pretty naturally, too, starting first with exploratory bumps and then graduating to taking limbs. The brief looks at the damage that we get are great as well, complete with torn muscle and bone. No clean edges here. Just realistic damage. This extends to non-shark injuries, too. There’s one stabbing at the beginning which is pleasingly bloody.

There’s a lot of obvious care in doing things as practically and as on location as much as possible. There are flies that kept landing on characters’ faces towards the end of the movie, and while it was a little distracting, I kind of loved it because it meant that they were actually there, on the riverbank instead of in a studio somewhere. It felt real. Tangible.

The characters, while not complex by any means, are fun. I enjoyed spending time with them, and there weren’t any that I really hated. Clara is a solid protagonist, calm under pressure and proactive, and there’s enough happening with Bull that I wish that he was given more to do.

Yes, the main human antagonist’s name is Bull. Yes, they are facing a bull shark. No, it isn’t particularly clever nor does anyone comment on the coincidence.

The point is that I like the dynamics. Clara, Jimmy, and Ernie feel like people who have worked together for years and genuinely like each other. That they all frequently and rather fluently spoke Jimmy’s language was a nice touch too, especially when contrasted with the intense racism coming from our antagonists.

Even our trio of gangsters felt like they had known each other for a long time and mostly liked each other. There was history there, and it made the times where the two groups interacted feel real. Honestly, I wish that there was more interaction. There was a lot of potential in the dynamic between Bull and Clara, but every conversation with them stayed very surface level and often repeated the same topic.

That’s where my biggest critique of the movie comes in. The script just isn’t as strong as the rest of it. It’s frequently repetitive in not just the topic of conversations but also specific phrasings. Bull almost entirely refers to Clara as “the skirt” and Jimmy as a couple of different racial slurs (there is a lot of period-typical sexism and racism throughout), which is fine but he also does it in almost the same order every time. Eventually, it caught on my ear and I couldn’t ignore it.

They also very clearly wrote themselves into a corner in the last act and had to use a deus ex machina to get out of it. It’s frustrating, because it wouldn’t have taken a lot of work to make it feel natural, instead. They just needed to add a few lines of dialogue.

The bones of everything are good. The script just really needed another pass to clean up those issues.

Random Thoughts

£250 is about $13,500 today.

The rendition of “Van Diemen’s Land” was very haunting. It’s been stuck in my head all day.

Hermione Corfield has some gorgeous blue eyes.

I don’t know if a gun would still fire multiple times after being submerged in water for several days, but I also don’t know enough about guns to say that it wouldn’t.

Perhaps it’s just the outsized influence of Steve Irwin on my childhood, but I kept expecting someone to mention crocodiles. Alas, our unfriendly animals are limited to just sharks.

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An Honest Fangirl loves video games, horror movies, and superheroes, and occasionally watches far too many shark movies.

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