Dreadfully Boring

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Deadwater starts in Saudi Arabia where the USS battleship Nimitz is docked, Colonel John Willets (Lance Henriksen) arrives on-board & meets up with Commander Combs to receive his orders. Willets is only six months away from retirement but is needed for one last mission, Combs explains that a ship commissioned by the CIA for black ops interrogation has fallen out of contact with no word from the crew or the terrorist they were holding. Willets & his team of SEALs find the ship in the Persian Gulf near Iranian waters, they board they ship & find the entire crew seemingly slaughtered except for Willets son Colin (Gary Stretch) who has no idea what happened, why the rest of the crew is dead or why he is still alive. With no sign of the terrorist Willets assumes that he was responsible but it soon becomes clear that dark forces at work on the ship, dark supernatural wartime forces that have stayed hidden for decades but has been woken by brutal violence...Photographed, co-written, co-produced & directed by Roel Reiné this is also known under the titles Black Ops & here in the UK it's called Nazi Dawn on DVD, whatever name you watch it under this really isn't that good. The script uses the haunted ship idea also seen in the likes of Death Ship (1980) & Ghost Ship (2002) but manages to be worse that both, the script takes itself very seriously & there's not much fun to be had here at all. The mixing of horror, thriller, supernatural & Nazi themes are handled with dull aplomb. The only thing I can really remember about Deadwater is that there are lots of scenes of people walking around very dark corridors which gets very repetitive & very boring very quickly. The script tries to throw in some nonsense about Nazi's & them creating some ultimate weapon & has a confusing twist ending that is both underwhelming & relies on seemingly random flashbacks & sound-bites from earlier in the film that made no great sense to me & while I sort of understand what happened there's not much logic behind it & it could have been explained better. At 90 odd minutes Deadwater feels longer & I got quite bored, it's just people wandering around an extremely dark ship with a fairly mundane supernatural mystery element that never interested me or drew me into the story. I just thought Deadwater was a routine, low budget supernatural horror thriller with a weak script that could have been half decent but it's all so forgettable & dull.I assume this was filmed on a real ship as the locations look good even if it's often so dark it's hard to make out any real detail. There's some blood splatter, a few dead bodies are seen & a few severed limbs but all of the gore is after the fact with no on screen kills that I can remember at all. There's nothing that creepy or scary here & the supernatural force has no great reason behind it, why possess that guy at the end? Why not just kill all the black ops like the previous crew? Why didn't that terrorist guy reveal the major plot twist if he was there at the start & saw everything?With a supposed budget of about $1,000,000 Deadwater looks slick enough I suppose & is well made, apparently filmed aboard the S.S. Lane Victory in San Pedro in Los Angeles. The acting is alright from a fairly bland cast, veteran actor Lance Henriksen as usual manages to turn in a better performance that the material deserves.Deadwater is a forgettable haunted ship supernatural horror thriller that I didn't think was much good, a muddled plot that tries to be mysterious & a lack of any memorable moments sink it. Watch Death Ship or Ghost Ship again instead.

It comes close to being the worst movie I've seen this year. Lance Henriksen must have lost a bet or been really desperate to make his car payment to appear in this. His acting is okay, given the crap script but the male lead has all the charisma of his favorite weapon, a shovel. The girl was a stupid and pointless character, only there to star in a brief topless shower scene. And the villain? Well it turns out it's the good ole USA since nothing but the guiding spirit of an undead Nazi super-soldier could possibly explain the liberation of Iraq or the War on Terror, right? Evidently a totally different writer took over for the last ten minutes of the film or else he ran out of coke and ideas.This might be worthwhile to rag on with friends or if you're a big fan of Henriksen (the reason I watched) or the female lead (Kate Randolph looks too skinny here), but otherwise stay away. As horror or anything else it fails. Even the gore was hilariously inept such as someone with a freshly stabbed eyesocket that looks like rubber with dried blood on it. And it reminded me a little of the old teen slasher flicks since the girl decides to shower in the midst of the gory murder and mayhem and has no gun or protection while she does it.

Well, to say that BLACK OPS (a.k.a DEAD WATER) is Oscar gold would probably anger a lot of people who have seen it, but for me as a horror fan, it was like watching a movie with my TV turned off, everything that mainly took place in dark areas you couldn't see and the places that were supposed to be well lit, seemed like the light was cast by using very cheap bed lamps, honestly the lighting effects in this film are so poor adjusting your TV's contrast makes it look like your watching a fog bank, the storyline is uninteresting, plainly put, the acting seems decent but the dialog was poor so the acting is more shallow Overall, If you don't like a movie that mainly takes place in the dark and don't have an interesting storyline, well try something else of course.

What could have been an OK movie, comes away as a just a decent one. That is mostly due to the part they had to involved the horror part in it. If the they just left it with a secret terrorist interrogation facility which become overrun by the terrorist held capture. Which then the black ops come and secure/rescue the sailors etc left alive on the ship. It could have become a good B-action/thriller movie but no they just had to make it a cheap horror/thriller movie instead which then fails badly on the horror part and is just decent on the thriller part. To return to the horror part why o why do they continue to go back bad Nazi science projects gone bad etc so they can make kind of cheap horror flick. It's so much easier to market and make money if they just went with the average b-action movie.Overall if you like cheap horror movies is for you. The rest well it i'sent any good really.