Beneath Still Waters (DVD)

I have mixed feelings about Brian Yuzna movies. They're kinda tacky (to wit: the exponentially growing female breasts in Faust: Love of the Damned; the jailhouse rat vs. zombie-penis in Beyond Re-Animator), but usually I cannot help but be entertained on some level. I was curious about Beneath Still Waters, because it seemed to be one of the famed writer-director's more serious, less over-the-top offering than his usual direct-to-DVD fare.

I was right. While Beneath Still Waters is hardly the stuff streams are made of, it has the grains of an intriguing back-story — it begins in Spain, some fifty years in the past when a couple of young boys, out exploring a town that is doomed by imminent flooding, run afoul of a Satanic cult. Unwittingly unleashing an everlasting evil, one boy dies and the other lives on to his eternal regret.

However, Beneath Still Waters really isn't about them. The tale, actually set in present day, follows a young single mother, Teresa (Raquel Meroño), who is a TV news reporter doing a story on the anniversary of the town's flooding. Her cameraman is Dan (Michael McKell), a single dad whose son died in the lake a few years back. The boy's death was one of many over the years that seems to be connected with the long-drowned town. As the pair works on the story, they find out there's something stirring beneath the glassy surface of the lake.

While there are a lot of long, dry spells between the deaths, when the killings do come they're worth the wait. There's the ripping off of lower jaws, arms being bloodily hacked off, and even a violent, fatal orgy. (OK, so maybe Beneath Still Waters isn't actually one of Yuzna's more restrained efforts!)

The acting is quite bad (as is the dubbing of the Spanish actors' voices) and the special effects are uneven, but there is a certain soggy charm to the whole thing — Beneath Still Waters is recommended as a rental, but only for those familiar with Yuzna's outré oeuvre.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson