-may contain spoilers-
This movie was great for what it is, with effects by Stan Winston being one of the LOWEST points in the movie. Frankly, if you don't enjoy cheesy old monster movies, then there really must be something wrong with you, no they're not great movies, but they're fun. This one actually is a good movie, which is quite rare when Vincent Price or Peter Cushing aren't the top billing in the credits.
The movie is quite good up until the end, with good acting, good camera work, good production.. this isn't your low budget straight to video, shot on a camcorder type movie, it looks very nice. Costumes, sets, even the mermaid effects are all very good. And as for the mermaid there's a comment here about how nudity ruins this film. How? She's a mermaid. It'd look really fake if she was wearing a set of shells over her breasts like in a Disney movie, and they weren't zooming in on her chest constantly or anything. The character was simply topless. I can show you lots of movies that would have taken a topless character and exploited it at every opportunity, but it was all pretty tasteful here.
The problems start when the mermaid transforms into generic "Alien" clone #764. The creature doesn't really look bad, but it really doesn't fit the character. This is the queen of the mermaids, but ends up being your standard movie monster, stomping around tearing people up. I'd have given this monster quite a bit more grace myself, less horns and more of a seductive quality like she had in mermaid form, you know, something to connect her to being a mermaid besides a slight fishy look? Normally I'd have nothing to complain about here, as these scenes are normally the high point of creature features, but the rest of the movie was of much higher quality than this, and a standard "rubber monster kills some people" scene just doesn't cut it.
People that didn't enjoy this at all need to earn themselves some movie history and figure out why most big Hollywood movies are boring, lame, and overpolished. Not to say that this is the height of cinema, far from it, but I'll take more of these over Swimfans and Screams and Men In Blacks any day.
Go watch the old Universal monster movies, most everything Hammer ever made, and a bunch of Vincent Price movies, then see what you think about a newer movie made in the same vein.
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