The Watermen (2012) – Film Review

In The Watermen, Jason Mewes wants to help you get naked. And die.

The Watermen, directed by Matt L. Lockhart and starring Jason Mewes, proves once and for all that Jason Mewes is clearly incapable of choosing his own movie roles and in future should be placed under some kind of Hollywood house-arrest until Kevin Smith goes back to making comedies again.

Mewes, of Jay and Silent Bob fame, plays Trailor, a millionaire playboy who brings along some friends and some hot girls to go on some kind of fishing holiday. Along the way the boat loses power and they are ‘rescued’ by a boatful of the eponymous watermen, or deep sea fishermen. Theirs is a diminishing trade but they have found that their catch increases many-fold when they use human flesh to bait their hooks. Thence, violence ensues.

If this film were in hands more skilled than Lockhart’s, it could have been truly great. If it were a story about fishermen who, in the midst of a dry season and starving to death, are forced to use human flesh against their better judgement to save their families, they themselves being prisoners of their own design, then this would have been an interesting ninety minutes. Instead what plops out of our screens is a cartoonishly vile story about backwoods hick fishermen defiling the beautiful city men and womenfolk. The film might as well have been called Watching Beautiful People Die.

Mewes’s stock in trade, his only character, is that of a lecherous manchild and, luckily, he is dispatched pretty quickly as the main horror of the film kicks in. The other ‘characters’ are killed, raped, and corrupted in other ways that are usually left off-screen or glimpsed through half-darkness. The first five minutes of the film sets out its stall pretty well – there’s an attractive girl being chased through some marshes by a big fat fisherman, and oh look, there’s a nipple. Nipple, action, nipple, and then the fisherman stabs her and drags her away. Brill.

This film confronts the reader with a vision of pure filmic horror – it is I Know What Mewes Did Last Summer. It is terrible.