User Reviews

***Minor Plot Spoilers***

I must confess to having a soft spot for Wayne Crawford. I know little about him, but he appears to have masses of enthusiasm to compensate for his lack of talent. In his films he usually performs multi-tasks - perm any 3 from lead male, director, producer and script-writer - tackling story lines from the sub-basement. Despite this the end product is usually enjoyable fun for the non-discerning.

'The Evil Below' features Crawford as a down-on-his-luck Captain of a ramshackle charter boat, a bit like Bogart in 'To Have & Have Not' - the similarities between the films ends here though.

The story begins with an underwater scene with two divers searching a wreck, before being attacked by an unseen creature - bit like the start of 'Jaws 2'. The wreck turns out to be that of the 'El Diablo', which went down centuries earlier. The ship was manned by heretic priests on the run from Spain, with a cargo of stolen Church treasure. This allows the introduction of various links to supernatural forces with Lucifer and The Armageddon both getting a look in. The films title refers to this sunken Devil-ship, rather than any malevolent sea-creature.

Whatever faults the film has (and there are many) it is fun to watch and competently made. You can't help but like a film which, in the final 5 minutes, copies the famous beach scene in 'From Here to Eternity' and the final line from 'Casablanca'.

The Evil Below starts on 'The Straits of San Sebastian 1683' as the 17th century treasure ship the El Diablo sinks in a violent thunderstorm. Jump to 'The Straits of San Sebastian Present Day' where two divers are exploring the beautiful underwater coral reefs that are rich in wildlife, the come across the sunken wreck of the El Diablo & explore it but are attacked & killed by something that looks like a vicious eel. Captain Max Cash (Wayne Crawford) owns & runs a boat-for-hire named the 'Vagrant Viking' which caters for tourists who want to fish, dive & generally explore the islands. Sarah Livingstone (June Chadwick) is an art teacher who dives for treasure as a hobby (well we all have to do something to pass the time right?), she hires Max & his scantily clad assistant Tracy (Sheri Able) so she can try to locate the El Diablo & get rich. Talk of sunken treasure excites some of the more unscrupulous members of the local community, as they dodge the criminals & thugs it is brought to Max & Sarah's attention that the El Diablo has a sinister past, a past that supposedly still leaves it's supernatural legacy behind even now...

Directed by Jean-Claude Dubois, according to the IMDb with a little help from star Crawford although the version I saw only listed Dubois, I thought The Evil Below had some potential & is a bit different but unfortunately that's not enough to save it from sinking to the bottom of the sea like a stone. The script by Arthur Payne starts off OK with the two divers being killed by some sort of sea creature but this opening is NEVER referred to again, the creature is NEVER seen again & there are no more supernatural killings. The Evil Below then suffers from a serious & terminal case of identity crisis, it doesn't seem to know what it wants to be as it chucks bits & pieces of various genres in there from underwater adventure, horror, action, thriller, crime & it even has time to throw in a little murder mystery & religious nonsense as well. As a result The Evil Below feels very bitty, fragmented & since the best scene in the entire film is the opening sequence I found myself sat there becoming more & more frustrated at the lack of any consistent horror as it went downhill rapidly & the fact we never see the sea creature thing again. The Evil Below is dull, slow, uneventful, predictable, silly & lacks any sort of charm or intelligence, in short The Evil Below doesn't do anything right that a good film should.

Director Dubois fails to liven things up although he obviously shot plenty of underwater wildlife material as at times I thought I was watching a National Geographic documentary with all the shots of fish, coral & the wildlife in general. Forget about any gore, some blood stained water & blood coughing is about as gory as it gets I'm afraid.

Technically The Evil Below is very basic, it's bland & totally forgettable apart from nice underwater photography of fish. This is point & shoot stuff & as a whole the production values are very low, even the place where this was shot doesn't look very sunny or appealing. The acting is poor, but then again did you expect anything else?

The Evil Below is a poor film, it's basic story is all over the place & it can't decide what it wants to be & as a result it ends up being a mess. Add that to the low production values, the fact there's no gore here & absolutely minimal horror content you have a film that is probably best avoided unless your absolutely desperate & even then surely there are better ways to spend 90 plus minutes of your life...

Not a morality tale, not a horror movie, could be tenuously called a slasher, but without the gore, because gotta keep it down, because El Diablo (the Devil incarnate himself, who "knows things he can't know") just straight up murders everyone, all by himself, like a big boy, and for no obvious reason too - despite liking "Evil, greed, and despair"

• nobody is framed/goes to jail, or gets tormented for even a minute for all those random deaths.

The random-a** girl?

(you see, from the beginning of the movie there's a scantily clad woman on the captain's boat he periodically slaps her ass and gestures to her but that's about all the interaction that they have and now she's dead and her head is missing)

...They both just forget about her immediately

the landlord?

Duh, who haven't seen dead landlords in their appartments, amirite?

The priest?

You think he was trying to write the word "SHIP"?! No! He was warning us, he was trying to write the word "STUPID" as in "stupid scenario" but was conked-out by the movie director.