Speaking of wet creatures that emerge every twenty years ago to get attention, Mena Suvari found work again. Would you believe she’s been active since American Beauty? No, seriously. She has dozens of imdb credits… some for things you’ve actually heard of. I mean, go figure, y’know? Today is Mena’s lucky day because she’s in a stupid cheap-ass Netflix semi-horror film nobody would have seen were we not still in the pandemic ages. It’s like finding a nickel under your porch because you were forced to chase a rat through your crawl space.
Today’s film begs the question: “How creepy do you have to be before you stop being hot?” What Lies Below tells the story of three people (Suvari, Ema Horvath, Trey Tucker) who all kinda seem to be about the same age except that one (Suvari) is playing a mom, so there’s that. But what’s really important is that mom’s boyfriend is hotttttttt. Like smokin’ hot. Like so hot it’s even part of movie dialog as if women actually say things like that in public.
And for some reason, everybody lives at a lake house. And the movie doesn’t bother explaining why August 28 looks like Autumn, nor why the high-school aged Liberty (Horvath) spends the next month at the lake house rather than going to school. In fact, so little of this film makes genuine sense, I will stop trying to explain it. Point is, new dad is hottttttttt! Unfortunately, he’s also really weirdddddd. LIke creepin’ on your showering high school d
aughter just to sniff her weird.
And new dad (Tucker) isn’t just awkward-shy-might-be-repressed weird. New dad is “lamprey eels are beautiful” weird and “lemme get a taste of that period blood” weird. That’s really weird. And yet, excusable, cuz Hottttttt! And again we’re back to: “How hot is so freaking hottttttt that you don’t notice the dude blinks sideways, huh?”
I’m never going to tell you What Lies Below is a good film. It isn’t. But if I’m being honest, I did care enough to see it through and I really wondered how Mom and Liberty were going to find liberty … or at least a wet vac. There’s a lot of water in this film. I digress. This is the kind of film like Species or Magic Mike that you watch late at night with a lot of your friends. There’s no illusion that you’re seeing great art, but there’s a possibility of enjoying the ride all the same.
With curiosity ramped up a notch
Suspicious step-dad this girl did watch
He had a weird thing with water
Which resulted in the daughter
Screaming “Why is there an eel up my crotch?”
Rated TV-MA, 87 Minutes
Director: Braden R. Duemmler
Writer: Braden R. Duemmler
Genre: MST3K
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: The idiocy tolerant
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: People with no belief in “alternative science”
