Spain 1965. Two boys goes to see their old town one more time before it completely floods over forever to be buried deep under the lake. But they discover that the town that was supposed to be deserted still has some people left inside of it, and when they free one of those people, they also let evil loose. Fast-forward 50-something years and a boy that is swimming in the lake goes missing. And that's just the beginning as what's underneath the lake now comes alive again.
For many years I considered myself to be a fan of Brian Yuzna, but as for now, I'm sure that those days are way over. The man has made some great films in the past, but his last film Rottweiler sure didn't do it for me, and neither did Beneath Still Waters. Although, I must admit that I was actually pretty excited to see the film when I first heard about it, but unfortunately it turned out not to be that great. Story-wise I believe that the movie had a lot going for it and I would definitely like to read the novel that the film was based on. Now, it might work well as a novel but on-screen it did not quite do the job.
At the very beginning, we're introduced to two little boys, with both of them having extremely irritating accents, that pays a visit to their old hometown which now is a deserted ghost town, just about to flood over and to be buried under water. While being in the watery town, all of a sudden they hear some voices and goes to see where those voices came from. They enter a big building and what they find in there is something horrible that one of them happen to release...nice going little dude. This is how the movie started out, and the actual horror parts of it looked completely ridiculous, so obviously it wasn't such a good start. Eventually it got a bit better to later slow down a little too much and towards the end it delivered something very predictable and unsatisfying.
 
One major problem I had with Beneath Still Waters were that all the characters were very uninteresting, and that alone made it really hard to get into the flick. From a horror point of view it treated the viewer to some decent gore and one or two scenes that actually featured some really decent horror. And while the film looked pretty good and the lake itself that you got to see a lot of had this mystery to it, the movie never fully managed to create a good atmosphere, and that is truly something it sure could've needed. I have to say that some scenery looked very cool and at the same time a bit spooky, but it never really managed to grab you and pull you into this whole ghostly atmosphere that I guess it was trying to create.
It also suffered from delivering a proper balance and to give a good impression of the film as a whole. The reason for that is that sometimes it looked very slick, had nice scenery and some pretty interesting camera-work that might have added a positive feel to it, but then sometimes it just looked like your typical B-movie and that, accompanied by quite bad acting, didn't really help. It also struggled with some bad CGI which I guess wasn't all that bad (the same goes for the acting), but often the computer effects just made it look cheap and stupid instead of it enhancing things.
Sorry to say since Yuzna used to be great, but I would actually have to warn you about this one. It was not all bad, but while Beneath Still Waters had some good things to it, it at the same time had much more negative things that in the end made it come out not looking very sharp as a whole.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE: Bajo aguas tranquilas
MOVIE YEAR: 2005
DIRECTOR: Brian Yuzna
WRITING CREDITS: Matthew Costello, Mike Hostench
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Norberto Morán, Ricardo Birnbaum, Charlotte Salt
COUNTRY: Spain
RUNTIME: 92 min
RATING: 4/10
Beneath Still Waters Website/IMDB Click here
Beneath Still Waters Trailer Click here
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