Thursday 6 July 2023

Cold Skin - Attack of the fish people

I didn't know what to expect from this movie when I sat down to watch it.  Just before the start of the First World War, a young man (David Oakes) takes a job charting the weather on a remote island, only to discover it's not as 'uninhabited' as he first thought.  Besides the location's only 'official' resident, a lighthouse keeper played by Ray Stevenson, every night the place is besieged by seemingly never-ending armies of fish people - and they're not the sweet Disney Little Mermaid kind either! 

So, the two men must start a fight for their lives in order to survive not just the night, but an entire year before the next boat passes by and hopefully rescue them.

I really enjoyed this to begin with.  There's a real feel for the isolation of the setting and the characters are believable in their actions - at the beginning.  However, as other reviewers have pointed out, the audio is terrible in places and the conversations between the two - only - characters is almost impossible to make out.  It's because of this I may well have missed out some explanations of various plot points, like why one fish person seems to be nice and Ray Stevenson is okay with her living alongside them when he simply wants to wipe the rest of them off the face of the planet.

The creature effects are good and it's nice to see not too much computer-generated effects, but the movie starts to drag in places, partly because there's only really two characters and there's not an awful lot for them to do, other than fighting off wave after wave of monsters.

By the time the film comes to an end you'll kind of have guessed how it's going to play out.  There's no real shockers along the way.  It's an okay sort of film that was effectively a good idea, but just kind of outstayed its welcome based on the little 'story' there was to tell here.

6/10 Should probably keep you awake if Freddy Krueger was haunting your nights

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