I’m a fan of Guillermo del Torro. I liked both Hellboys, the Devil’s Backbone was very good, I thoroughly enjoyed Crimson Peak and of course, Pan’s Labyrinth is a masterpiece. I saw the exhibit on him at the Art Institute a year ago and it was great!
Zack is an even bigger fan than I am, so we were looking forward to his latest cinema offering. It was $5.00 Tuesday, so Josie joined us at The Shape of Water.
We were totally ready for something weird, macabre, spooky, dangerous and beautiful.
I suspect that Sr. del Torro figured that vampires and zombies had been played out; heck, even Frankenstein got a romantic retelling in the last decade so what’s left?
The creature from the Black Lagoon!
The movie is set in the late 50s or early 60s, at a government scientific facility. The main character is a mute girl who works as a cleaning lady at the place. The CIA has captured the creature and have in a tank so US scientists can study him. KGB is after him, too. All very well and good but the movie was bad.
I mean, it was surprisingly bad.
It’s like a really bad translation of the movie Splash! Without the charm and jokes. Anyway, Mermaids are cool. Humanoid blowfish? Not so much. The creature reminded me more of the Flukeman of the X-files than Darryl Hannah. It was more like watching Jaws, only instead of killing it, Roy Scheider falls in love with the shark.
It was full of repetitive, stupid scenes that did nothing to move the story along, the love story was icky and you could see every plot ‘twist’ coming from ten miles away. What wasn’t gross (it gave new meaning to the term ‘boning a fish’) was stupid. I don't care how lonely I got, I wouldn't date the salmon. Worst of all, it was the one thing no movie can afford to be: it was boring.
And tossing a musical number into the mix for no reason at all only works if you’re Gene Kelly in the Dancing Cavalier.
If I had been watching it on TV, I’d have turned the channel after ten minutes. It was just so dull.
Unless pescaphilia is your thing, there’s no reason to see The Shape of Water.