Customer Reviews

Dead in the Water [VHS]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Call it a sleeper or rare find, but this movie is one of the funniest I've seen. Smart, sexy and filled with twists and dark humor. If you liked Pritzi's Honor, you'll love this one. One of the first feature films w/Terri Hatcher and Brian Brown is wonderful as a lawyer who tries to commit the "perfect crime." The crime isn't, but the movie is. It makes me laugh every time I see it and I can't recall how many times I have. An excellent murder mystery, too -- you'll love it!

This was actually made for cable TV back in 1991, but is well enough directed by Bill Condon to make it feel like a feature release. Based on a 50's hard-boiled pulp novel by the great Harry Whittington, Web of Murder, the movie stars Bryan Brown as hot shot attorney Charlie Deegan who's married to a rich wife played by Anne DiSalvo and who has a sexy secretary Laura (Teri Hatcher).

So there's the standard noir plot elements--lust and greed and murder. Yep. But the way they're put together here is sharp and nifty, with lots of juicy dark humor along the way, so this is a really fun movie.

Nice score--dig Satchmo's singing in the opening credits--and the acting, especially by major fly-in-the-ointment Veronica Cartwright (who puts a serious damper on Charlie's plans) is very strong.

A really good addition to your neo-noir collection, Dead in the Water is a great way to spend an hour and a half soaking up them noir vibes. Oh, yeah.

For inspired casting, try putting Australian Bryan Brown--native accent intact--in the role of corrupt American lawyer Charlie Deegan whose marriage is crumbling and whose secretary is too luscious to ignore. What this does is highlight the corruption on display by playing up Charlie's personality to the max. Very smart.

Charlie comes up with a plan to get rid of his oh-so-wealthy wife that looks completely foolproof, but we all know that in these noir flicks, things NEVER go as planned. Do they? Nope. The plan is to bump her off, inherit her money and run off with Laura the luscious secretary. Unfortunately fate has other things in mind.

The direction here, by Bill Condon, is whip smart-tight. The music is perfect, underscoring the black humor on display, including an opening tune sung by Louis Armstrong. There are enough laughs to keep things lively, and the supporting cast--espeically Veronica Cartwright as an obnoxious, pushy woman--is right on the money. Contributing to the nasty high jinks here as well are Pruitt Taylor Vince, one of the best unknown American actors around, Seymour Cassel, and Anne DeSalvo.

A real shame this is not on DVD. Add this to the almost unknown group of smart, non-DVD released American neo-noirs which include Mortal Passions, Genuine Risk, Delusion, The Outfit, and Charley Varrick.

Recommended.

I really thought this was a wierd movie, but I still liked it. The plot was just a little obvious to me, and the way it ended I was supprised. It just jumped from one thing to another.

Harry Whittington, author of over 200 novels during a lengthy career, with "Web Of Murder" the noirish thriller upon which this film is based appearing in 1958, is widely recognized as one of the more skillful plotmasters within the field of crime fiction and this production adheres to the basic structure of the original. The work is replete with wit, although the majority is not found within the mildly disjunctive scenario or from the, at times, somewhat languid direction of canny Bill Condon, but instead is centered within the moodily clever lighting and camerawork under supervision of Ron Murphy, along with the creative and droll costumes of Grania Preston. Murphy's fellow Australian Bryan Brown capably portrays Charlie Deegan, a rather unsavoury American defense attorney in love with his secretary Laura (Teri Hatcher), and conspires with her to murder his moneyed wife whom he detests, but as we must expect from a cinematic crime of passion, dire complications ensue after there is no turning back. Whittington's novel, of the hard boiled genre, whisks along at a fevered pace whereas this picture, utilizing a voiceover track of Brown, is more leisurely yet still quite enjoyable largely due to its sharp casting from top to bottom with only the aesthetic exceptions of Anne DeSalvo and Veronica Cartwright, each next to impossible to make as undesirable as their characters are in the book. Cartwright gathers in the acting laurels here with her feral performance as Deegan's fly in the ointment, with Hatcher's prototype from the mystery novel being far more aggressive than is the actress in a role that, after all, depicts murder for profit, while top-flight supporting turns come from Pruitt Taylor Vince, Ron Karabatsos, Anna Thomson and Brent Hinkley; additionally notable are the splendid sets of Jim Adams, art design by Richard Sherman and a wry thematic score by Philip Giffin, all complementing the visual concepts of the cinematography, while one shall not overlook the extraordinary opening credits, employing a spider and a hapless fly (come into my parlour....), highlighted by excellent sound mixing for this stylish and generally overlooked film.