LEECHES!

The young athletes of an American college swimming team use steroids to improve their athletic performance. During training in a lake, some of them are attacked by leeches but do not pay attention to it. As a consequence, the leeches, having fed on blood laced with anabolic steroids, grow and head hungrily towards the campus. It will be up to the young chemist Spencer to find a way to annihilate the threat. Reading the plot, "H2O - Blood Bath" does not seem despicable; in fact, it brings to mind those B-movies from the 80s like "Dimensione terrore" or "Slugs - Vortex of terror" that, in turn, winked at the glorious horror cinema of the 50s and 60s. Too bad that when you look at the result of David DeCoteau's latest film, you are faced with the usual bad, squalid film of the director of "Brotherhood". The problem with "H2O" (which is more explicitly titled "Leeches!" in the original), in the end, lies with who is behind the camera, that terrible David DeCoteau whom we could comfortably elect as the worst director in cinema history. Apart from the fact that DeCoteau has no style and completely lacks the aesthetic taste for the image, his films all have irredeemably poorly defined characters, absurd dead times, and that insistent and complacent homoerotic vein that would eventually tire even Boy George. So expect a lot of sloppiness, abundant boredom, and long scenes with muscular young men who take showers and walk around shirtless in the most gratuitous way possible. The special effects in "H2O" are then worthy of being framed in the trash museum. But here it is not a matter of lack of money or good effects artists, but of simple negligence. For the series "and what do we care, let's do things dog-style, just finish the film before dinner." When seen from afar, the killer leeches are simple plastic puppets that remain motionless while the victims scream and thrash about without a real reason, while when you see them in detail advancing on their victims, they are simple gloves with the tips of the fingers shaped like leeches! Yes, you heard right! You can easily recognize the fingers of the person animating them that go up and down to simulate the advance. Stuff that even Ed Wood would have slapped DeCoteau for! And how credible are these muscular young men who are perpetually half-naked and scream and panic as soon as they see the beasts, without reacting? It's not that they think about shaking them off their backs or stepping on them, no, they throw themselves to the ground and let themselves be attacked by the glove/leeches screaming or, if they are really brave, they thrash about a bit. There is not a drop of blood, not a scene of tension, not a really erotic shiver: in "H2O" there is nothing! And the actors? Of a unique caginess. The female protagonist, who should be the most serious of the group, is a kind of Barbie with a perpetually vacant look who says and does stupid things (the pool scene at the end is laughable); the protagonist, played by DeCoteau's fetish actor Michael Lutz, is the smart one in the group, the one who studies chemistry, biology, and therefore can save humanity. And you know how he differs from the other shirtless guys? Simple, he wears glasses. That is, do you realize how limited the characterization of the characters is? Wearing glasses is a synonym for intelligence, like the Smurf Brainy or the Gremlin Brain! You can see that DeCoteau and the screenwriter Michael Gingold have really tried! But then, what is the point of the final twist? How do they justify the behavior of that guy? Is he an aspiring James Bond villain? There are no words to adequately convey the ugliness of this film, a poor job done by a poor director, who has practically always (but particularly in recent years) produced the worst that the American low-budget film industry can afford.