A double dip in the ocean tonight. First up the 2016 Stephen Chow film The Mermaid. He directed it and he gets first screenplay credit, along with 7 other people, but he doesn't act in the picture.
It's a silly romantic fantasy with mermaids. A rich businessman, played by Deng Chao, has bought a picturesque wildlife preserve called Green Gulf and he's planning to turn it into a tourist resort. He uses a sonar device to drive the fish and dolphins away. The device also hurts, and kills, some of the merpeople who live in the water by the Green Gulf. They decide to kill Deng and they plan to set up a honey trap with the completely adorable Lin Yun as bait.
That's Lin Yun on the left. This is her second movie. The other person is her Uncle, he's a merman with tentacles like an octopus. She's hasn't got the heart to carry out the plan after she falls in love with Deng. Things get dicey for a while when Deng's business partner goes on a mermaid hunt. It actually gets pretty dark about then, not Game Of Thrones dark, but dark enough. Things turn out OK, Stephen likes his fairy tales to have happy endings.
I was totally entertained and would be happy to see the movie again. There's plenty of funny stuff going on, nice sets and scenery, some interesting characters and plenty of silliness. The movie broke records in China and like the Chinese I was happy to see it too. I'd be happier to see Stephen in front of the camera but I can always go back and watch his old movies. He's one of my favorite Chinese stars and he has plenty of great films. You can find out if you like it at the link in the title above. Move fast, it might not be up there too long. For some reason the image in the movie has been flipped but the subtitles are normal. I've seen that happen before. People do the weirdest things to the image to try to beat YouTube's policies.
Our second feature was Leviathan which I haven't seen since I first watched it in 1996. I hadn't been to see it in the theater when it came out in 1989. That's the first year I started keeping my Watched Movies List. I wasn't going to the theater much in that year. I didn't remember much of anything about this 1989 movie. Some under sea miners have problems after they encounter a sunken ship on the ocean floor. It's called the Leviathan and it's listed as being still active in Russia. The ship look like it was torpedoed deliberately.
Peter Weller is the head guy on the mining shack. That's their living quarters under the sea. Richard Crenna is the doctor, Daniel Stern is the dumb ass that brings the Russian ship's safe back to the mining shack. He sneaks a metal flask out of the safe and later he shares it with Lisa Eilbach. Amanda Pays, Ernie Hudson, Hector Elizondo, Michael Carmine and Meg Foster round out the cast.
The liquor in the flask turns Daniel and Lisa into monsters. The infected get sick, grew scales, die and reanimate. At one point the mutated people fuse together and turn into a mass with human faces. I think they were heavily influenced by The Thing. The effects makeup is OK, not great, but mostly interesting. The monster hunts the crew, picking them off one by one, integrating them into the monster mass. Even if a limb gets cut off it stays alive and continues to grow into a new monster mass.
It's not a bad movie, little above average but not a lot above average. It's written by David Peoples and Jeb Stuart. David has some pretty good credits, he co-wrote Blade Runner and Unforgiven, Soldier and Twelve Monkeys all stand out in his list of films. Jeb's got a fairly good list including Die Hard and The Fugitive. It's directed by George P Cosmatos who also directed Rambo: First Blood Part II, Cobra and Tombstone. I didn't have a copy and probably won't bother getting one.
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