Format: DVD from Lena Community District Library throught interlibrary loan on basement television.
Submarine movies are their own particular little subcategory of war films. Most submarine movies have an element of horror to them in the sense that they are almost inherently claustrophobic. So, while “horror” might be a stretch in a lot of cases, at the very least, there’s an element of fear involved in them. That makes a film like Below an interesting proposition, as it is both a war/submarine movie and overtly a horror film. It essentially billed itself as “Poltergiest on a submarine,” and honestly, there’s no way it could live up to that hype, and it frankly doesn’t. There’s a story here, but in large part, this functions like a long episode of “The Twilight Zone.”
In 1943, in the dead middle of World War II, the submarine USS Tiger Shark is patrolling the Atlantic and, due to its position, is ordered to pick up survivors spotted by a British plane. There are three survivors of a British hospital ship recently sunk, and because we need some tension right away, one of the survivors is a woman. The survivors, who have been in the water for a couple of days, are brought on board just as a German destroyer shows up, so we’re going to get a little cat-and-mouse and the sub will take some depth charge damage before escaping. During that attack, the sub gets targeted specifically because a record player starts up out of nowhere. After the encounter, the sub’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Brice (Bruce Greenwood) discovers that one of the rescued people is a German, and he shoots him.
