I rented a videocassette of this movie on a whim since I'd never seen or heard of it before, and the title and video box made it seem like it was an underwater adventure of some sort, which would have been interesting to me. The colorful illustrations on the box show a lady swimming underwater with a diving mask on, a seaplane on fire, and both the front and rear covers show sharks underwater. The reality is there isn't a single underwater scene in the entire movie, no sharks whatsoever (not even a single fin), no seaplanes (on fire or otherwise), and no diving masks. Therefore both the title and box artwork are extremely misleading.
Not only were the plot and theme not what I was led to believe, but I found the entire movie to be disappointing. The style of the photography, the sound quality, the swelling horn music at transitions, the limited sets, the unconvincing props, the hasty romance, and the unrealistic acting all scream "made for television." The only thing this movie really has going for it, other than some marginal swimsuit scenes, is a quick series of twists at the end, which I won't fully disclose here.
The movie starts with a man at a dock being pursued by other men for an undisclosed reason, and he retreats via a boat to a sparsely populated island, intending for his pursuers to lose interest and to lose track of him over a period of time. While wasting his time away drinking and playing chess against himself in a cozy seaside home on the island, a woman clad in a bikini knocks at his door in a rain storm, seeking shelter. She claims to frequently swim to the island to sunbathe in the nude, and that the sudden storm caught her by surprise. They have an affair (very discrete scenes there) and soon they supposedly fall in love with each other after she visits him a few times. Via a newspaper article she sees his photo as implicated in a murder, but she isn't particularly bothered by it. She asks him about it, finds out he's a hit-man, but rather than be frightened off, she suggests he kill her rich husband who lives on the island so that she can gain a huge inheritance. He agrees to go through with it, then the twists start hitting. Along the way he suffers some (unrealistically depicted) hallucinations, submits to (unprofessional) panic, that panic exacerbates his problems, then a series of unexpected incidents occur rapidly, and the ending comes just as unexpectedly.
For the most part I thought the film lacked excitement, interest, scenery, realism, and most anything else that might have saved it from TV-style mediocrity. And that's not even considering the misleading promotion of the film via its title and box cover. In summary, I found this film to be very mediocre and disappointing in every way, made worse by its misleading promotion.
Not only were the plot and theme not what I was led to believe, but I found the entire movie to be disappointing. The style of the photography, the sound quality, the swelling horn music at transitions, the limited sets, the unconvincing props, the hasty romance, and the unrealistic acting all scream "made for television." The only thing this movie really has going for it, other than some marginal swimsuit scenes, is a quick series of twists at the end, which I won't fully disclose here.
The movie starts with a man at a dock being pursued by other men for an undisclosed reason, and he retreats via a boat to a sparsely populated island, intending for his pursuers to lose interest and to lose track of him over a period of time. While wasting his time away drinking and playing chess against himself in a cozy seaside home on the island, a woman clad in a bikini knocks at his door in a rain storm, seeking shelter. She claims to frequently swim to the island to sunbathe in the nude, and that the sudden storm caught her by surprise. They have an affair (very discrete scenes there) and soon they supposedly fall in love with each other after she visits him a few times. Via a newspaper article she sees his photo as implicated in a murder, but she isn't particularly bothered by it. She asks him about it, finds out he's a hit-man, but rather than be frightened off, she suggests he kill her rich husband who lives on the island so that she can gain a huge inheritance. He agrees to go through with it, then the twists start hitting. Along the way he suffers some (unrealistically depicted) hallucinations, submits to (unprofessional) panic, that panic exacerbates his problems, then a series of unexpected incidents occur rapidly, and the ending comes just as unexpectedly.
For the most part I thought the film lacked excitement, interest, scenery, realism, and most anything else that might have saved it from TV-style mediocrity. And that's not even considering the misleading promotion of the film via its title and box cover. In summary, I found this film to be very mediocre and disappointing in every way, made worse by its misleading promotion.