"Below"

[JohnL]

Recently, I watched "Below". I thought it was a decent horror movie.

During World War II, an American submarine finds three people flaoting in the ocean, two men and a women. They're the only survivors of a medical ship that was torpedoed. Not long after they're brought on board, things start going wrong. A record player starts playing while they're hiding from a German ship, giving away their position, systems start to malfunction, there's a mysterious banging on the hull. Not to mention that the captain was lost at sea shortly before the survivors were picked up and the senior officers seem to be hiding something. Is the ship haunted or is it sabotage?

I thought the cramped interior of the submarine was a perfect setting for a creepy atmosphere. At one point, a team has to go outside and go between the two hulls of the sub to find an oil leak. I'm not sure if subs really have that much space between the outer and inner hulls, but watching the men slosh through the dark, half submerge compartment gave me goosebumps.

The only parts I didn't like were that it followed some of the same cliches as most underwater movies, namely that the sub gets more and more damaged as the movie goes on and the cast is eventually pared down to just a handful of characters.

On the other hand, it had a couple twists that I didn't see coming. I recommend it.

[Mr_Vindictive]

I have to agree, Below is quite a good horror film.  Directed by the same director as Pitch Black and written by Darren Aronofski, writer of Pi and Requiem For A Dream.

I love how the superstitions played into the film.  The whole thing about being bad luck to have a woman on board was fantastic.  The film also had a few seriously creepy moments, mainly the reflection scene....great stuff.

I think this one would have been a pretty big film if the studio hadn't screwed it over at it's time of release and only released it in a few cities.  It is overall a great little supernatural thriller with some kick ass twists as JohnL mentioned, especially the end.

Think Das Boot mixed with The Mothman Prophecies.  It has the cramped feel of Das Boot with the supernatural/impending doom feel of Mothman.  Great stuff.