BELOW (2002) Whaaaaaa? No monster? Submarine movies tend to remind me of prison movies...greasy men who can only semi-tolerate each other, stuck in a cramped space with a rigid authority structure to keep them in line. There's less anal rape in submarine movies though. So I guess I prefer submarine movies. For some reason I was sure that the problem encountered by the crew of this submarine was a giant marine monster, not an apparent haunting, but obviously I was wrong. Not sure where I heard that about the monster, but I've been carrying that little bit of misinformation in my head for years. 1943, the Atlantic. The crew of the sub Tiger Shark picks up three survivors from a torpedoed wreck, one of which is a woman. Word of this gets around the sub in a good demonstration of how hard it is to keep anything quiet on a submarine (not to mention how many slang terms there are for "woman" and "Brit", even if several of them seem made up by the screenwriters). This brings out terrible secrets from both parties, in part because it appears to set off a haunting. More than any suspense movie I've seen in a long time, this movie is about sound. This must've been great to see in a theatre, or even just on a really good sound system at high volume. Spooky sounds we can sometimes identify, and sometimes can't, assail us at a rate which would either harden a submarine crew into total unflappability, or drive them mad (that latter one's popular). Not all of it is the standard array of spooky noises and soundtrack stingers; sometimes it's just the wrong sound at the most horribly wrong time (like Benny Goodman's "Sing, Sing Sing"...I've been wondering what that song's been called since I was in junior high). Many of the tried-and-true elements of submarine movies are absent - no bolts shooting around the inside of the sub, for example. There's been about one big sub movie a year for the last little while, and most of them seem to rely on these things. I was glad this one did not. There is not much of a sense of humor in evidence, except as provided by a bushy-bearded pulp lit enthusiast whose name escapes me, who at about the film's halfway point amusingly deflates the possibility that this is going to turn into one of those "Surprise! You're dead!" movies. For the most part, it's grim and serious while being not very violent, leaving it mostly up to your imagination, as ghost stories almost always should. The ending's a little too easy (though not so easy that it makes entirely clear whether what we've seen is really a haunting or just some people going batshit under stress), and at 104 minutes, Below runs too long to sustain its languid pace. But it's very well made, well enough to convince you the whole time that you're under the sea and that's more than Deep Shock did. A good movie to watch alone in the dark with a great sound system and no interruptions. That last one's important. BACK TO THE B's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE