Ghost Ship (1952)

Rumours of a ghost don't stop a couple from buying a ship but after their crew members flee their jobs, the couple hire a paranormal investigator whose arrival on board the ship marks the point this low-budget nautical thriller becomes really, really scar...ily bad - none of the actors has any choice but to bear with stoic faces the paranormal investigator's awful explanations and the acting from that point becomes more wooden and more hollow than the ship's hull. 

★★☆☆☆

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The Abyss (1989)

Three years after his huge success sending a Sigourney Weaver-led crew of marines on a deep-space salvage mission in Aliens, James Cameron blasts a Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio-led crew of oil engineers on a deep-sea salvage mission where an Aliens' gun metal blue and grey colour-palette (cut across with bright yellow industrial pipes and machinery) is the setting for a convergence of underdeveloped plotlines (like one character's bad case of the bends, a volatile marriage, and political tensions between Russia and the USA), things all better explained in a later released extended version but here only very loosely held together by the presence in the movie's periphery of a species of, what, lost jellyfish Aliens?

★★★☆☆

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Aquaman (2018)

When Aquaman says late in the movie he's doing what he's doing for all the people he loves, he must mean his dad and a bald bikie who asks for his picture in a bar - oh, and perhaps an arguing news team - because they're the only people we see him grunt and stare impassively at in his "surface" life, while under the water the most remarkable thing going on, much more interesting than the Lord of the Borings political fantasy going on between kings and Ocean Master and m'ladies on seahorseback, is everyone's underwater hair, by far the most animated thing in this terribly acted and very uneven superhero movie, a bit Brendan Fraser's The Mummy, a bit LoTR, a bit kitsch Flash Gordon scifi but always, most consistently, um, wet.

★★☆☆☆

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