Organs Ahoy

 

Water horror! What an underrated subgenre. Sure, running from an ax-wielding maniac in the woods may involve cutting up your arms on pointy branches, but the ocean has spiky coral and bitey piranhas and so much more. More water horror I say!

Quick Plot: Kaya is a sad young woman in the Florida Keys trying to keep her family together in the wake of her mother's death. Tessa, her best pal, convinces her to take a day off jet skiing to the Bahamas on a double date with Tessa's Julian and hot friend Xander.

All is fun in bathing suits until Julian takes a dumb risk on his vehicle and ends up adrift. Xander, now in full makeout mode with the finally loosened up Kaya, quickly runs him right over before flipping deep into the water himself. It really all can happen in an instant, eh?

Things are looking like a floating appetizer table for sharks, but luckily, they're spotted by a passing boat steered by Captain Rey. 

Not so lucky. Before you can say "is that a bottle of chloroform that you're pouring on a cloth right in front of me?", Kaya gets, can you believe it, chloroformed. We've got ourselves an organ ring!

With Xander barely breathing and Tessa conscious but dealing with severe injuries, it's on Kaya's swimming champ shoulders to call for help and evade Rey and his doctor partner Curtis (good old Dean Cameron). 

Written and directed by Phil Volken, Dead Sea seems to be channeling the PG13 summer energy of The Shallows. I'll never be mad at the kind of movie that lovingly watches beautiful people swim in blue waters filled with graceful turtles and colorful fish. It's one (of many) reasons that I love A Perfect Getaway so very much. 

Dead Sea is very far down from those aforementioned summer thrillers. That's not to say it's a wash. At just under 90 minutes, it wastes little time in telling a fairly tight tale of a rough 24 hours. Isabel Gravitt makes for a likable protagonist who's easy to root for. While the majority of our time is spent with two attractive young women in 2-piece swimsuits, it never feels like Volken's camera is leering at their bodies. That in itself is a respectable choice. Kaya is smart and resourceful, and her friendship with Tessa feels real and deep.

On the other hand, the actual pacing of the film's second half feels oddly stilted. What should be a taut cat-and-mouse chase on open waters somehow feels like a quick game of hide and seek with too easy a finish. Even the cut to our coda feels weirdly off, as if one more run in the editing booth would have smoothed things over. 

High Points

For all my shoulder shrugging over the end product, the first big twist of Dead Sea really does come out of nowhere in an exciting, shocking way that makes me want to see more of what Volken has up his directorial sleeve

Low Points

Any thriller set in a confined space should be deeply disciplined when it comes to establishing its geography and unfortunately, I never felt I knew my way around Rey's fairly small boat 

Lessons Learned

Pigs are pretty good swimmers

Nothing sterilizes your tools for organ removal more effectively than windy saltwater breezes

Oceans may be big, but you should still keep your eye on the water when jet skiing to avoid running over your best friend

Rent/Bury/Buy

Dead Sea is perfectly passable entertainment. It starts far better than it ends, but it has a solid foundation of a nice look and strong lead. I can't imagine ever revisiting it or even remembering much about it in a few years, but I didn't feel like I wasted my time. Make of that what you will! It's currently streaming on Hulu. 

NERD ALERT! Brian Keene's Dead Sea

I’m generally underwhelmed by horror fiction because in my experience, it's too often riddled with clunky language and character cliches. Every now and then, however, I brave the library in search of a good gore-filled read to make the subways more interesting and long lines less infuriating.


Brian Keene, author of the well-known zombie epic The Rising, is quickly establishing himself as a major figure in the undead world of corpse-munching bookworms. Dead Sea was published in 2007, and packaged in a conveniently petite package, it’s pure comfort food. If World War Z is a five star meal at an unpronounceable Zagat rated restaurant with three forks and cloth napkins, Dead Sea is a greasy burger oozing in cheddar cheese and served with salty fries.


The novel begins in the projects of Baltimore (complete with a much-appreciated-by-me shout-out to The Wire), where our narrator, Lamar Reed, is struggling to cope with the city-wide infection of Hamelin’s Revenge (as the plague is commonly called due to its origin from rats). Zombies are rampant, in both human and various animal forms. As Baltimore stars to burn, Lamar is forced on the move and quickly befriends two spunky kids and an incredibly useful gun enthusiast/ex-Bible salesman. After a series of undead swarms (one of which includes a tiger), the group boards a retired Coast Guard ship with a motley crew of diverse survivors.


Dead Sea has quite a lot to offer zombie fans. Keene spares no grisly detail as he describes the walking dead so well, you can almost smell the stench of rotting flesh. The concept of Hamelin’s Revenge “jumping species” is truly terrifying and opens up a whole new realm of horror possibilities rarely explored by other works. Any zombie fan living in a coastal area probably assumes that in the event of disaster, the ocean is the safest place. Sure. Because zombies don’t swim. But zombie humans walk. And logic would follow, a zombie fish...well, I’ll avoid spoilers and just tell you to buy the book.


One of the most refreshing aspects of Dead Sea is Keene’s prose. As our narrator, Lamar has a strong and unique character voice, aided by the fact that he’s gay and black in a genre that rarely acknowledges a man like his existence. There are no token romances or overly villainous stock characters, and while Keene does get a little too obvious in dressing up his heroes with blatant discussions on archetypes and Joseph Campbell references, the novel ultimately succeeds in creating people to care about in a world ready to devour them.