BENEATH STILL WATERS

Luis and Teo, two curious kids, sneak into a village evacuated by the authorities that is about to be flooded to create an artificial lake. The two discover that people are chained in the church's basements and, seeing them, ask to be freed. Teo frees one of them, but this one kills him and then feeds his corpse to the others. Forty years later, on the occasion of Roberto Borgia's death, mayor of Desbaria, his daughter Teresa and his niece Clara arrive from London but discover that the village is infested by a malevolent entity that is corrupting the minds of the inhabitants and sowing death. The Fantastic Factory has the merit of having relaunched the horror genre in Spain, abandoned for too long and explored sporadically in the years preceding the third millennium. Unfortunately, among some extremely valid titles, the production company founded by Julio Fernandez has launched equally poor ones and, it pains to say, most of them bear the signature of Brian Yuzna, co-founder of the company. Yuzna, although it's been years since he directed a really "decent" film, has managed to make a name for himself in the horror landscape thanks to some appealing early career products, among which we undoubtedly cite "Society", "Re-animator 2" and "Return of the Living Dead 3", but since he has formed a partnership with Fernandez, his signature has become particularly faded and most of his films oscillate dangerously between the almost mediocre and the outright ugly. "Beneath Still Waters" definitely belongs to the second category and shows many of the limitations that Yuzna's cinema of recent years presents. Let's start with the screenplay, written by Angel Sala and Mike Hostench, based on a novel by Matthew Costello. The story lacks bite already, but the script manages to ruin even the few winning ideas due to a total lack of interest in the slightest character development (and yet the film tells a choral story!) and for an accumulation of "stolen" elements from the history of horror cinema that do not fit well together. In some parts it seems that the screenwriters wanted to draw from "Fog" by Carpenter, insisting on the city's anniversary and the curse that on this occasion would have struck (every now and then we can see a thick fog appear!), then there are elements clearly taken from "Dagon", by friend Stuart Gordon and also produced by the Factory, and so on with elements even from "Jaws", "Creepshow 2" and "The City of the Dead". The dialogues appear particularly flat and the pace of the film is dangerously slow during most of its development, increasing only in the last twenty minutes. The fundamental problem is that too much was thrown into the fire with the result of burning everything: the film has zombies, ghosts, curses, prophecies, satanic sects, catastrophism, but it does not develop any of the elements and only spins its wheels. At some points, it even manages to descend into involuntary ridicule and watching the guy who is made to spin in the air or the threatening face that materializes in the water, one can only laugh heartily. The only scene that shows a touch of the Yuzna of yesteryear is the orgy scene that wants to clearly cite "Society" but that in the end only feels out of place. The direction is then particularly lackluster and anonymous, hampered by a poverty-stricken TV movie-like staging and by a particularly unmotivated cast and often unsuitable for the roles assigned, it is enough to think that the beautiful protagonist Charlotte Salt, who is from 1985, has as her mother Raquel Merono, who in the registry has only ten years more than her... and it shows! The only points in favor of "Beneath Still Waters" are the effective makeup effects and some well-made splatter sequences. Not much, I would say. Extremely avoidable.