User Reviews

note; contains spoilers

All I can say is DUMP RIPOFF! The shark practically disappears for the middle part of the movie when we're forced to watch a boring hostage situation that had little plot and made little sense. Now when asked why there were so few shark scenes, the producers will likely give the 'less is more' rubbish but that's just not true. The shark scenes were mostly crappy. Showing the entire shark swimming underwater at the beginning wrecked it since we've seen the entire shark so any suspense of a possible magic moment when we first see the shark is now destroyed and the shark is tiny (maybe 8 or 9 feet in length) which makes it salmon compared to just about any killer shark we've seen in a Jaws/Deep Blue Sea/Shark Attack film. Any fear we could have had about this shark was ruined with the ridiculous scene when Lou Diamond Phillips is half way between the shark and the boat (he's originally trying to stay still but then realizes it wont work) and somehow manages to get on the boat without being eaten. The average shark swims 25 times faster then the average human which means that this shark likely could have swam to the bottom, swam to the boat, done a triple lutz and then eaten Lou but yet apparently it couldn't even swim twice as fast as a human.

Other stupid scenes; -the whole scenario of the kid seeing his grandfather get pulled off the boat and eaten, then hiding in the boat, the boat saling into the docks on it's own, the kid being too shocked to speak was a COMPLETE RIPOFF of the sequence in Jaws 2 when the beauty pageant winner sees her boyfriend Eddie eaten while on a boat (everything with these two characters plays out the exact same way). -The opening sequence of the brunette in the red bikini getting eaten is a ripoff of the Jaws flicks: They go into the water all smiley and giggly to have some fun (Chrissy in Jaws), she gets brushed against by the shark (which is stupid because she feels the shark and at first doesn't know what it is but then figures out it was a shark without even seeing it and why would the shark have not eaten her then?). And then the shark gets seen and the classic lifeguard on the megaphone and people rushing out of the water sequence which happens in 3 out of the 4 Jaws flicks occurs.

-pretty much any scene involving Lou Diamond Phillips. When the shark attacks the older fellow, Lou jumps in the water after him (trying to be a hero even though he has no weapons to attack the shark with and there's a 95% chance that anybody who is in a shark's mouth isn't coming out). Then when he sees the shark, he looks all shocked. The guy was given umpteen opportunities to be a hero in and out of the water and fails every last time with the possible exception of the ending. How in the world does he get a shark tooth stuck in his foot from an attack but not lose a single part of his foot is beyond be (the tooth supposedly broke off but a sharks jaw and tooth is much stronger then a human foot). The guy has huge financial troubles and is about to lose his most passionate asset (his boat) yet when he's killed the shark which would trigger an automatic 100 grand, he decides not to tell anybody about the shark because of some stupid legend. Could you see anybody with huge financial troubles throwing away money like that?

-the ending: it would be physcially impossible for the shark to be suspended in air with the drill going in it's mouth. The outwards spin of the drill would push the shark away from it (in fact even if the drill were set in reverse and had an inwards spin, the shark would have fallen down into the water). Even if it were possible for the shark to be suspended in air like that, eventually once the drill cut a big enough hole through the shark, it would have fallen down into the water. There is no way it could be torn to pieces like it was.

And I thought Jaws 4 was the worst shark movie ever. At least that dreck had Michael Caine in it.

But noooo... TBS has to make it's own contribution to the shark attack genre. And I swear to God, if any movie needed to be MSTed, it would be Red Water. There is absolutely nothing salvagable in this movie. Worst no-name actors who couldn't deliver a line properly if their lives depended on it. The soundtrack is full of horrible '80s music that no-one has heard of, probably because it's the only music they could afford the rights to. Probably the producers spent all their budget money snorting crack off of public urinals. And talk about inappropriate. This hick fisherman just gets off his boat and sees his best girlie or whatever walk up the dock to him. And this classical music with soft French lyrics starts playing, like they're in some palace ballroom dancing and not on a boat and covered in fishguts.

And the dialogue would make baby Jesus weep. For some reason, there's some convoluted plot that has some down-to-Earth Cajun and Texan catfish-fishers, hot hippie ecologist chicks, and black gangsters complete with huge gold jewelery, all ending up at the same Lousiana river. So the horrible stereotypical dialogue just chokes the entire movie. You can tell the actors are thinking, "Why do I deserve to be in this TV movie. At least Jaws 4 had Michael Caine. Who am I co-starring with? The principal from Saved By the Bell."

The gangsters and drug-dealers have it the worst though.

"I want you to bust a tack in that guy's ass." (Yeah, it said tack. Note: Switching nouns around does not make it wittier.) "I hate that double-crossing blood clot." "So Jerry, you wouldn't be honking our geese, would you?" "Hey, send me home to mama, bitch." "I had a band." "What'd you call it? Jerry and the Idiots?" "You aint't no shark. I'm the shark. That's why I got da money!"

And the plot is not better. There are huge half hour stretches of the movie, where the shark isn't even mentioned. In Jaws, the shark is MIA for most of the movie, but the people are always talking about or trying to fix the whole problem of the shark. "Red Water" should have been named "Here's A Movie with Eco-Cows in Tight Shirts Who Get In Gun Fights With The Gangsters Who Are Hunting For Hidden Drug Money And the Shark Has The Best Agent Out of All of Them Because He Spends Most of the Movie Off-Screen Snorting Cocaine off the Back of A Public Urinal With the Producers."

There's a nice scene where Eco-Cow leader and her cronies get kidnapped by the gangsters and taken onto their boat. The Russian-sounding gangster starts molesting her and taking off her clothes with a hunting knife. And I swear to God that the camera is situated on her cleavage for the entire conversation. I mean, writers... C'MON! Your characters are on a lake the entire movie. Can you not think of a better reason to show some boobs that having a random rape scene in the middle of a shark movie. At least have the shark rape her if you must, and make him earn his paycheck.

I was fully expecting to hate RED WATER. Not only is it a modern-day shark movie (set in a river) that rips off the likes of JAWS (underwater menace shots), ANACONDA (the setting) and DEEP BLUE SEA (huge mechanical explosions etc.), it's also a television movie, a genre of films that I typically dislike. Talk about everything conspiring against it from the start...anyhow, I was pleasantly surprised by this film when I watched it, and I ended up enjoying it a lot more than a lot of other big bucks fare. It's a film with plenty going on all the time, and a plot that is straight out of a B-movie action/thriller, not a monster movie. The story involves some criminals searching for stolen loot, and rapper Coolio has a large role in the film as an imposing, trigger-happy stock gangster cliché. There's plenty of shooting, stabbing, and fighting, and really, when you think about it, not that much shark action. But I enjoyed it anyway.

Sure, the film is predictable, the story little more than a reason to put a group of people in a single location together and have lots of conflict between them. But the acting isn't half bad; everyone seems to be making an effort here, which is more than can be said for some films. Coolio is definitely the worst actor but his performance enters the so-bad-it's-good category so you can't complain. Of the others, Rob Boltin is engaging as a Cajun, Kristy Swanson is far better (and prettier) than she was in that BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER movie and provides some pleasant eye candy, and Lou Diamond Phillips actually cuts the mustard as an action hero, all muscles and stunts and heroic stuff.

While the Louisiana setting means we get some Cajun dancing (think SOUTHERN COMFORT here) and provides an original backdrop for the underwater menace (the movie was actually shot in South Africa, and looks good), unfortunately the plot plays out strictly by the book. The black expendable dies early on, the bad guys can't hit anything when they shoot, and despite the watery setting just about everything in the film blows up at some point, captured in loving slow motion, of course. The shark never feels like much of a menace and is a cross between acceptable CGI work and a decent animatronics model. Unfortunately, it's not on screen very often, only popping up every half hour or so to make an appearance. The gore effects are kept to a minimum and consist of blood pooling in the water and a cheesy severed arm shot. One thing I did particularly like was the ultra-cheesy ending, which sees the shark being literally drilled to death; nicely grotesque, it's a fitting climax to a decent little thriller.

Not very fearsome. Boat Captian John Sanders(Lou Diamond Phillips)is about to lose his boat due to lack of on-time payments to the bank. He is persuaded by his ex-wife(Kristy Swanson)to help her company find natural gas in a Louisiana river. At the same time criminals are looking for a sunken chest full of money. A gruesome discovery is made; a Bull shark is stalking the quiet lazy waters in a search of its own...human blood. It doesn't take long before you realize this is just another low budget shark flick. The action is about as slow as the dialog is dumb. And the shark scenes are noticeably too fake. However my favorite scene is...let's say when the shark gets "drilled".

I'm a Phillips fan, but this movie makes BATS(1999) look pretty damn good. Coolio is horrid as bad guy Ice. On the other hand Rob Boltin's character Emery is likable. As for Swanson...she is female. Fears strikes out this time.

It was the best shark movie I ever saw in 2004 It may change. But any way it has good things and bad things.

Bad things.



The first time you see the shark is when you see a digital version of him swimming and you can see him with a scar down his left eye. Then you never see him with that scar ever again. Unless you watch it again.

And another digital shot was him with a triangle cut out of his dorsal fin.

I don't remember him with with a triangle cut out of his dorsal fin again in the movie.

And then there's the fake looking puppet.

Good Things

It was a shark movie with a lot of story. It's about my favorite shark: the bull shark. And they did good work on the shark. The perfect shaped dorsal fin and tail. It had a nice funny scene that I liked a lot. And if you're like me and like good shark attacks This movie has them. And they're not gross. So if you're a gore fan go see deep blue sea.

I am a retired oil company engineer and early in my career was a drilling engineer. Later, I worked as an oil and gas production computer automation system engineer on a project in the West Lake Verret field in the Atchafalaya Swamp just outside Morgan City, Louisiana, where this movie was supposed to take place. The movie was entertaining, but I found it difficult to watch without noting a lot of inaccuracies having to do with the location and the drilling operation.

Usually in movies about the oil industry, the terminology is totally screwed up. In this movie, the terminology was generally correct, but the drilling equipment was nothing like the real thing. I chuckled when they pulled the drill string out of the hole when a blowout was about to begin. Blowouts are generally caused by drilling at thousands of feet of depth into abnormally high pressure zones for that depth and for the density of the drilling mud. When the decision was made to come out of the hole, the man in the control room just hit the controls and out came the drill string in a matter of seconds with no assistance on the drilling floor. In real life, it would take a crew of roughnecks on the drilling floor hours to pull out thousands of feet of drill pipe.

Another serious flaw was the drilling equipment. Drilling rigs derricks are typically 100 or so feet tall to allow pulling drill pipe out in triples (three 30 foot joints of drilling pipe at a time). The derrick in the movie looked to be 30 or 40 feet tall, more like one used to drill water wells.

I'm surprised the commenter from Louisiana didn't say anything the discrepancies between the real Lake Verret and nearby Morgan City. There are no hills as are shown in the movie. The highest ground in that area is the levees built up around the Atchafalaya Swamp and the bayous. The water is muddy, not clear as shown. The bottom consists of many feet of mud, not nice clean gravel. In one of the opening scenes, one of the teenage "Cajun" girls pronounces Verret, the name of the lake, with the accent on the first syllable rather than the second. Later other actors pronounce it correctly. I was impressed however that early in the movie one of the bad guys pronounced "Atchafalaya" correctly with a silent "A".

Another thing I thought was curious was, although generally looking like a Cajun, Lou Diamond Philips' last name was Sanders, rather than something like Boudreaux. There are exceptions of course. Most of the rest of the natives had Cajun last names, but not him. Strange since he seemed to be portrayed to be a local.