Susan Granger’s review of “Red Water” (TBS Superstation – premiere on Sat., Aug. 17)
“Jaws” told the tale of a great white shark terrorizing a New England shore community. In this thriller, it’s a bull shark that’s ventured into a murky river in the Bayous of Louisiana. Lou Diamond Phillips (“Wolf Lake”) plays a disillusioned oil driller-turned-fisherman, who’s recruited by his ex-wife, Kristy Swanson (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), to help search for natural gas in a wildlife refuge. Problem is: as they realize that their oil rig may explode, they’re hijacked by a trio of drug dealers (rapper Coolio, Jaimz Woolvett, Langley Kirkwood) who are looking for stolen cash in the same cove – and then there’s a nasty bull shark who’s just hungry for lunch. The bull shark is the only shark known to be able to live and thrive in salt water and fresh water; in fact, bull sharks have been found 1,750 miles up the Mississippi River. Over the years, bull sharks have been responsible for several fatal attacks on humans that were originally blamed on great whites and nurse sharks, both of whom rarely cause human fatalities. The shark used by director Charles Robert Carner is a free-swimming mechanical device controlled by robotics, and the cast did some of their own scuba diving. While screenwriters J.D. Feigelson and Chris Mack set this scare story in Louisiana, the filming actually took place on a private, family-owned site outside of Cape Town in South Africa. On the Granger Made-for-TV Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Red Water” is an intense, lurid 5. This monster movie with a message – and some catchy Cajun music by Louis Febre and Dominic Messinger – premieres on TBS Superstation on Sunday, Aug. 17, at 8 p.m. with encores scheduled at varying times on Aug. 20, 21, 23 and 24.
