“Deep Water”
Renny Harlin heads back to the deep blue — but this time the sharks aren’t the problem so much as the movie around them.
This return to shark-infested waters is a rote exercise compared to Harlin’s quirkier, “Deep Blue Sea” (1999), since “Deep Water” unspools as a by-the-numbers disaster flick. We’re introduced to a cast of personalities in Los Angeles, boarding a jumbo jet bound for Singapore. On the flight deck, Ben Kingsley is our captain, with a dutiful Aaron Eckhart as the first officer — one’s a karaoke-crooning charmer chasing a golden girl in every port; the other’s a straightlaced, former Air Force pilot with a few trauma skeletons in the closet. The X-factor in the misadventure is a bellicose, self-entitled slob (Angus Sampson) — basically everything that’s wrong with America — who chain-smokes wherever he pleases and leaves an e-device plugged into a charger in his checked luggage. Not good; you know it’s only a matter of time (though, given the film’s long developing arc, about halfway through the movie) before a fire breaks out in the hold and the plane goes down in the middle of the oceanic nowhere. A coral reef holds a few severed sections tenuously above water.
The crash also serves as a dinner bell for a shiver of ravenous sharks that take opportunistic pounds of flesh — limbs make for tasty hors d’oeuvres. The pat survivor-hell bears all the trappings of the cheesy, B-level disaster thrillers of the 1970s (“The Towering Inferno” and “The Poseidon Adventure”), but none of their lean-in bravado (and the special effects are lame, especially by today’s standards — “Sharknado” included).
Harlin cut his teeth on sequels in the “Die Hard” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchises. He never really found a directorial footing to call his own, and most recently helmed the god-awful chapters of “The Strangers.” He again reverts to a banal retread that no one will remember. — Tom Meek
Playing at Apple Cinemas Cambridge
“Hokum”
Damian McCarthy mines the lore of Room 237 from “The Shining,” and adds a fresh coat of eerie lacquer in this “don’t open that door” creepfest. The Overlook Hotel becomes the Bilberry Woods Hotel, a quaint inn nestled in the middle of the forested Irish nowhere. Our guide to the occult is a cranky American scribe with the pretentious moniker of Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott from TV’s “Severance”), who checks into the inn late with a mission in hand — to spread his parents’ remains on the grounds of the hotel where they honeymooned. Ohm’s a semi-famous novelist (movies have been made of his books) and a rather uppity guest with an in-your-face demeanor. Several of the staff ask about his writing process, but Ohm dismisses them all with a tang of cruelty. One staff member, sheepishly persistent, gets singed by a heated spoon. Only Fiona (Florence Ordesh), the doe-eyed barkeep wise to the author’s mercurial moods, manages to dance around the sour patches and have a meaningful conversation. Ohm’s a writer of adventure and horror, so he’s easily piqued by the honeymoon suite that, for mysterious reasons, is kept under lock and key.
During his wanderings in the woods, Ohm encounters dead goat carcasses and a cagey old hermit who imbibes milk spiked with psychedelics. To get to the bumps in the middle of the night, and the specter of the witch who allegedly inhabits the woods and nether regions of the inn, there’s a plot twist that lands Ohm in the hospital. When he returns to the inn — which is closing up for the season — he learns that Fiona has gone missing, and he’s convinced it has something to do with the honeymoon suite. McCarthy (“Oddity,” “He Dies in the End”) orchestrates the macabre mood effectively, and the musty chamber of horrors sets are well done, but the film struggles to pull together all the elements it has scattered on the table. Scott is a fine if fairly one-note grump, and the chills are above the bar, but nothing that will remain noteworthy of the genre. — Tom Meek
Playing at AMC Assembly Row 12
Cambridge writer Tom Meek’s reviews, essays, short stories and articles have appeared in WBUR’s The ARTery, The Boston Phoenix, The Boston Globe, The Rumpus, The Charleston City Paper and SLAB literary journal. Tom is also a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics and rides his bike everywhere.
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