I kind of enjoy seeing this movie every few years, for a number of reasons. The first reason is Jacqueline Bisset, She is stunning, all sun tan, big blue eyes that look in slightly different direction, impressively bebosomed, nice legs -- and we are introduced to her while she's scuba diving at Bermuda with her boyfriend Nick Nolte. She wears only her soaking wet T-shirt and a teeny bikini bottom. Later we are treated to her being felt up and undressed by bad guy Louis Gosset, Jr., and his gang of black thugs. Still later, a bunch of hoodoo priests hold her down on a bed, cut open her nightie, and paint her belly button with a severed chicken foot dipped in fresh blood. The thrills never end.
The second reason is the colorful and evocative location photography. Bermuda looks terribly appealing here. The palms, the brushy cliffs, the finely grained sand of the beaches, the salt-encrusted cottages, the eternal sunshine, the soaking T-shirts. After they find a bit of treasure and a bit of morphine in the rotting iron hulk of a sunken warship, Nolte and Bisset consult the local know-it-all and sociometric hub, Robert Shaw for advice. He lives in a cozy two-story white lighthouse atop a hill. The lovely couple also rent a pair of the motor scooters that are ubiquitous on Bermuda and are forced off the road in an arousing chase. The underwater photography is strikingly convincing, though much of it was shot in a tank. The Caribbean has never been so aquamarine. It's like reading Shakespeare's song from "The Tempest" -- "Full fathom five thy father lies" -- only on mescaline.
I guess the third is my admiration for the writer, Peter Benchley. This was his follow-up to the blockbusting "Jaws" a year earlier. Benchley takes these vacations, you see, to Martha's Vineyard or, as here, Bermuda or, as later, elsewhere around the Caribbean, learns a little bit about some features of the local culture, builds a commercial story around it, and then gets to deduct all his vacations from his income taxes. (Research.)
There must have been a fourth reason too, but I'm getting a little foggy. Maybe it's the bends! Oh, no. I know what it was -- the story. It's -- well, it's FAST. And violently expectable. There are three or four dives to the old shipwreck in the movie and there's not a one of them that doesn't involve multiple hazards. On the very first, mainly recreational dive, Jacqueline Bisset, who can be identified because she's the one wearing the soaking wet T-shirt, is poking her stick around in a hole in the rocks and the stick is grabbed by some unseen varmit that yanks her repeatedly against the hole, leaving her positively breathless although not at all breastless.
I mean it. You just KNOW that in the course of these dives a crate of ammunition is going to be shaken loose by a quivering of the feckless wreck and dumped down on Nolte, trapping him in a compartment below. You know this just as you know that sharks will appear at some point and do something that endangers the lives of the divers. For bonus points, a vicious moray eel appears suddenly, its many-toothed mouth wide enough to encompass a human head (which it does). There will be spear guns too, and they will be used in the course of an underwater fight in which dark gurgling figures tumble slowly around one another while grappling -- and simultaneously a fuze sputters nearer to the dynamite planted beneath them. And knives, naturally. Oh, and an exploding fireball above that lighthouse, and another under the hulk.
Then there are scenes in which we find out about treasure, establishing provenance (meaning authenticating the treasure), and things like that. Very educational.
Should you watch it? Why not? We all need a vacation of the mind.
The second reason is the colorful and evocative location photography. Bermuda looks terribly appealing here. The palms, the brushy cliffs, the finely grained sand of the beaches, the salt-encrusted cottages, the eternal sunshine, the soaking T-shirts. After they find a bit of treasure and a bit of morphine in the rotting iron hulk of a sunken warship, Nolte and Bisset consult the local know-it-all and sociometric hub, Robert Shaw for advice. He lives in a cozy two-story white lighthouse atop a hill. The lovely couple also rent a pair of the motor scooters that are ubiquitous on Bermuda and are forced off the road in an arousing chase. The underwater photography is strikingly convincing, though much of it was shot in a tank. The Caribbean has never been so aquamarine. It's like reading Shakespeare's song from "The Tempest" -- "Full fathom five thy father lies" -- only on mescaline.
I guess the third is my admiration for the writer, Peter Benchley. This was his follow-up to the blockbusting "Jaws" a year earlier. Benchley takes these vacations, you see, to Martha's Vineyard or, as here, Bermuda or, as later, elsewhere around the Caribbean, learns a little bit about some features of the local culture, builds a commercial story around it, and then gets to deduct all his vacations from his income taxes. (Research.)
There must have been a fourth reason too, but I'm getting a little foggy. Maybe it's the bends! Oh, no. I know what it was -- the story. It's -- well, it's FAST. And violently expectable. There are three or four dives to the old shipwreck in the movie and there's not a one of them that doesn't involve multiple hazards. On the very first, mainly recreational dive, Jacqueline Bisset, who can be identified because she's the one wearing the soaking wet T-shirt, is poking her stick around in a hole in the rocks and the stick is grabbed by some unseen varmit that yanks her repeatedly against the hole, leaving her positively breathless although not at all breastless.
I mean it. You just KNOW that in the course of these dives a crate of ammunition is going to be shaken loose by a quivering of the feckless wreck and dumped down on Nolte, trapping him in a compartment below. You know this just as you know that sharks will appear at some point and do something that endangers the lives of the divers. For bonus points, a vicious moray eel appears suddenly, its many-toothed mouth wide enough to encompass a human head (which it does). There will be spear guns too, and they will be used in the course of an underwater fight in which dark gurgling figures tumble slowly around one another while grappling -- and simultaneously a fuze sputters nearer to the dynamite planted beneath them. And knives, naturally. Oh, and an exploding fireball above that lighthouse, and another under the hulk.
Then there are scenes in which we find out about treasure, establishing provenance (meaning authenticating the treasure), and things like that. Very educational.
Should you watch it? Why not? We all need a vacation of the mind.