Director: Matt L. Lockhart

Cast: Jason Mewes, Richard Riehle, Floyd Abel

Synopsis: A clan of watermen capture a crew of sport fishermen who must then fight for their lives.

When the opening scene of a movie features a scantily clad girl exposing one perkily erect nipple while being pursued by a gang of men brandishing sharp tools you pretty much know what you‘re in for, and in that respect at least, The Watermen lets nobody down. Female nudity – while not exactly abounding – features at regular intervals between tepid scenes of gore. And, in one memorable moment, nudity and gore are combined as a mad fisherman, muttering unintelligibly, uses a blade to part a buxom young victim from her implants with the mangled explanation that they look nice but taste awful.

The Watermen takes as its starting point the statement that hundreds of people go missing without explanation at sea each year. Not a bad way to introduce a horror movie – but that’s pretty much as good as it gets. Instead of seasoned seafarers facing danger on the ocean waves, we get the usual assortment of pretty young things, possessors of hot bodies and one-track minds. Jason Mewes, who is yet to make a good career move that doesn’t involve Kevin Smith, plays a wealthy spoiled brat who arranges a fishing trip aboard a yacht for his two friends and a trio of hot chicks who rarely wear anything more substantial than a bikini. Two of these women are brazenly materialistic while the other is recovering from a failed relationship. Only one of them will survive the ordeal they’re about to undergo. Can you guess which one? Answers on a postcard please, to Mr. M. L. Lockhart, courtesy of Seven Cities Media.

The group stop off at a Deliverance-style bait shop to fuel up and buy some bait – a special, very bloody kind of bait which, unknown to them, may once have been the proud possessor of a perkily erect nipple. Once out of sight of land, their yacht develops engine trouble, and the group find themselves adrift with no means of communication, no food and no water after following an act of sabotage by one of the Deliverance gang while they were moored at the bait shop. After a testing night, rescue comes in the unlikely form of a rusty old trawler, crewed by more Deliverance rejects who feed the kids drugged water. Our hapless heroes then awaken to find themselves in the queue to be turned into that special brand of fish bait.

As well as the usual flaws common to no-budget horror flicks – crap dialogue, crap acting, obvious victims and survivors, protagonists with poor decision-making skills, bad guys who refuse to die, trucks that refuse to start at critical moments, and a total lack of original thought – The Watermen has to be one of the most misogynistic mainstream movies ever made. The women involved are nothing but pieces of meat, succulent morsels to be drooled over by its target audience of teenage virgins who lust after the thing that frightens them most, before they’re unceremoniously raped, speared, sliced, punched, kicked, hooked, fingered, half-drowned and more. After a while, the movie begins to resemble the wet dream of some troubled kid who’s just about to graduate from torturing stray cats rather than a horror movie with any aspirations of originality.

The Watermen will turn the stomachs of most intelligent viewers, but probably not for the reasons intended by Matt L. Lockhart who, having owned up to writing, directing and producing this mess, has no option but to stand up and accept the blame.