Underwater is a Howard Hughes’ produced movie that plods along with little suspense and very little in the way of any memorable characters, although at least the underwater photography was impressive, for what it’s worth.
Underwater!
— Warner Archive Collection —
(1955)
Genre(s): Adventure, Drama
Warner Archive | NR – 99 min. – $21.99 | January 28, 2020
Date Published: 02/01/2020 | Author: The Movieman
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THE MOVIE — 2.25/5 |
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Plot Synopsis: Along with his partner, Dominic (GILBERT ROLAND), and his lovely wife, Theresa (JANE RUSSELL), intrepid treasure hunter Johnny Gray (RICHARD EGAN) embarks on a quest for sunken treasure in the Caribbean. Outfitted with advanced scuba gear, the team struggles to pinpoint the location of the rumored shipwreck of a centuries-old galleon loaded down with priceless antiques. When a group of money-hungry pirates takes a sudden interest in their expedition, the Grays find themselves in deep trouble. Quick Hit Review: Underwater is a 1955 treasure recovery adventure-drama from Howard Hughes — with a $2 million production budget ($19.08 million adjusted) — which was, putting it kindly, plods along with little suspense, shoddy pacing and no noteworthy performance, although the lovely Jane Russell of course was beautiful, but her acting talents, as they tended to be with Hughes’ productions, was not fully utilized. On the plus side, I will say the underwater footage was half decent at least and… that’s about it. There was some fine tropical photography here and there, but a good amount was clearly shot against a green screen. Can’t say I was disappointed, but the premise sounded promising as I do tend to enjoy these sort of adventure films and also thought it would go into disaster mode with part of the sunken ship going over the edge, but as a whole, this was a lackluster production that was surprisingly pretty dull. Directed by John Sturges, who would go on to direct some classics like Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, tries his best with such a dull script and characters, but in the end I had a tough time sitting through this, even with Jane Russell in a film they proclaimed “as you’ve never seen her before”. Yeah, okay. Skip this adventure turkey, just watch The Poseidon Adventure again, hell 2005’s Sahara might be a better option… |
SPECIAL FEATURES – 0/5 |
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No features were included. |
VIDEO – 4.0/5, AUDIO – 3.75/5 |
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Warner Brothers releases Underwater onto Blu-ray, presented in its original 2.00 widescreen aspect ratio and has been given a new 1080p high-definition transfer. For the most part, this does look quite good in HD, detail is relatively sharp and colors are fairly bright, if not saturated perhaps having been colored with Technicolor? In any case, I’m not sure exactly was restoration work was done, however the picture seems to be free of any obvious film damage. The disc comes with a serviceable if not basic DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono track, which does output clear dialogue though, and this is due to the production, there was one line that clearly done via ADR. In any case, if I had any criticism, I did discern some minor hissing or a low pitch sound in a few scenes, but otherwise it was a fairly clean lossless track. |
OVERALL – 2.0/5 |
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Underwater is a Howard Hughes’ produced movie that plods along with little suspense and very little in the way of any memorable characters, although at least the underwater photography was impressive, for what it’s worth. |