The Watermen (2012)
4/10
Average teen slasher, nothing special.
18 December 2012
Warning: Spoilers
The Watermen starts as a group of friends set sail for the open Ocean to do some fishing & relax, however their boat develops mechanical issues & they become stranded drifting in the water. Suddenly help is at hand, a huge fishing trawler appears & the friends think they are saved. The men on the trawler pass fresh clean water to them & they drink it, minutes later they are all unconscious on the deck of their boat. The friends wake up in a wooden shack full of tables & tanks, it quickly turns out that the fishermen are sadistic killers who murder & then cut up their victims & turn them into fish bait. With several of the teens sliced into fish food the remaining survivors must try to escape or end up the same way...

Written, produced & directed by Matt L. Lockhart who also has a small cameo in the film as the bait shop customer this is typical teen slasher material with a somewhat sadistic & nasty streak that is absent from a lot of recent low budget slasher films, don't take that as any sort of recommendation but there it is. The script follows a tried & tested formula, don't expect to see anything original in The Watermen as you have your typical collection of faceless teen victims (I can't even remember any of their names) stranded in some isolated location being killed by the usual sadistic killers who seem to enjoy rape, torture & slicing people up with a variety of razor sharp knives. There are a couple of unpleasant rape scenes that aren't too graphic but add a certain sadism along with all the scenes of these kids being cut up, skinned & gutted which give The Watermen a slightly mare sadistic & nasty streak than a lot of recent low budget slasher films that I have seen. There's no great explanation behind anything, the teens just want to have sex & fish on a boat while all the killers are interested in is making more fish bait (surely there are easier & lass risky ways?) & if this stuff is so s*it hot then why sell it to these loser kids in the first place? You would have though they would have wanted to save the human flesh for themselves, I mean they seem to kill a lot of people but surely they can't have an endless supply of the stuff?

One problem with The Watermen is that there's too much footage of the character's running or splashing around in the water, people say stay here & I'll be back or make some silly suggestion that leads them right back to the killers & it's a bit lazy really. There's not much tension or suspense & why does the main killer have to mumble, I couldn't understand what he saying most of the time. There's a bit of nudity & a couple of brief rape scenes. There's some decent gore but it's mostly the same sort of thing with bodies being sliced & cut up, there's lots of blood & body parts as well. There's an amusing web-cam gag as well in which a guy gets his cock and balls out & show's them to his mates, yes it's childish but somewhat funny with it.

With a supposed budget of about $1,150,000 this was apparently filmed in Newport News in Virginia, the production values are decent enough & it's reasonably well made & doesn't look as low budget as a lot of recent horror films do.

The Watermen is an alright slasher with a slightly higher gore & nastiness level than I expected which helps, nothing brilliant & I can hardly remember anything about it but it passed 90 odd minutes harmlessly enough. I've seen better but I have also seen worse.
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