What Lies Beneath must be the most expensive and lavish cheap timefiller I've ever seen.
It's so densely packed with obvious melodrama and genre cliche, that it could easily be mistaken for one of those dire conveyor-belt mini series that Steven King keeps pushing out (supposedly to make up for the shortcomings of Stanley Kubrik or David Cronenberg).
Harrison Ford as a bad guy? Watch Mosquito Coast to see just how menacing the man can really be.
Scary and haunting? Not compared to real spinechillers such as The Changeling.
Tense, dramatic and manipulative? Try Memento instead.
Ultimately, What Lies Beneath, is a catalogue of half-measures. The fact that you've seen it all before shouldn't be a problem, so long as the old cliches are given a new slant, but the movie doesn't even go that far. What's worse is the fact that the movie starts slow, and grinds to a halt within the first hour. Despite a valiant attempt to regain some momentum in the last few reels, it ultimately gets nowhere.
The script alone makes this TV movie fodder, or at best a straight-to-video cheapy. How it got the budget and the names is beyond me.
A big disappointment.
It's so densely packed with obvious melodrama and genre cliche, that it could easily be mistaken for one of those dire conveyor-belt mini series that Steven King keeps pushing out (supposedly to make up for the shortcomings of Stanley Kubrik or David Cronenberg).
Harrison Ford as a bad guy? Watch Mosquito Coast to see just how menacing the man can really be.
Scary and haunting? Not compared to real spinechillers such as The Changeling.
Tense, dramatic and manipulative? Try Memento instead.
Ultimately, What Lies Beneath, is a catalogue of half-measures. The fact that you've seen it all before shouldn't be a problem, so long as the old cliches are given a new slant, but the movie doesn't even go that far. What's worse is the fact that the movie starts slow, and grinds to a halt within the first hour. Despite a valiant attempt to regain some momentum in the last few reels, it ultimately gets nowhere.
The script alone makes this TV movie fodder, or at best a straight-to-video cheapy. How it got the budget and the names is beyond me.
A big disappointment.