Sea of Fear (2006)

Watching Sea of Fear was quite a memorable experience. I didn't feel any fear, but I sure did drown in a sea of submerging boredom, bad acting, and the cruddiest choreography I've seen to date. Pardon me while I dig deep for the right words to describe just how much of a stinker this bumbling abomination was.

But Sea of Fear is a top contender-a top contender in my 25 all-time worst movie list. It was unequivocally the most horrible flick of 2006, and if that is not enough, it now has the added honor of being equaled in awfulness by only 24 other films in existence.

The story is about a group of teenagers who head out to sea for a diving project, but little do they know, a killer is on the boat with them. Trapped at sea, one by one they are picked off and killed. Sounds like an interesting story, doesn't it? Well, it's not. Where the lameness of a typically bad movie with rotten teen actors ends, Sea of Fear is just getting started!

The mechanics of the story seem like they would be compellingly scary. The thought of being trapped out at sea on a small boat with a murderer who covers his or her tracks well enough not to get caught sounds interesting. The problem is that director Andrew Schuth sucks and wouldn't know how to make a movie to save his freaking life! To say that this was a poorly constructed film is a compliment.

Randomly throughout the film, the director repeatedly and unnecessarily cuts away from scenes of kids on the boat or at a party on the beach to pictures set to music of corals and fish swimming. Often times, needless cutaways bring the viewer right back to the exact same scene as before with no augmentation whatsoever. But ridiculously cut and spliced scenes are only one problem here.

Imagine ten minutes of the camera rolling where girls sit around on the ship's deck and talk "girl talk" only hours after finding out that their friends are missing. And the funny thing is, even the girl talk sucks! The world's preppiest manicure-loving rich girl wouldn't talk this way. No one throughout the film talks normally, in fact. The assininity of the progression of the story will have you on the edge of your seat in total awe of how any director could knowingly create a movie like this and not immediately flee to Zimbabwe afterwards! Don't see this film! Your homemade camcorder movies of you making funny faces and being silly as a kid in the backyard are far better.

Many other jewels are found in Sea of Fear too, like a girl screaming and no sound coming out of her mouth, a kid hanging himself and obviously not being dead, a ship's captain mysteriously tied up and gagged in a closet with no explanation, stupid grins and inane facial expressions, a small girl strangling a decent-sized guy with a life-preserver, and those long-running moments of dialogue where nothing (and I do mean nothing) makes any sense. Watching this film was a mentally torturous experience-no, I'm not kidding!

Redeeming qualities? There were none, none at all, unless you count some suspense generated from wondering just how atrocious the film is going to get before finally having the decency to end. The film's finality was no better or believable than the rest of this time-wasting catastrophe. I am well aware of the fact that this review is going to prompt a few of you to watch the movie just for the laughs of seeing something awful, or else to see if what I had to say was accurate. To those brave souls, I offer these words of wisdom: You'll never get those two hours of your life back! Don't say I didn't warn you!

(JH)