She’s Coming For Me…
Main Cast: Moise Brutus, Taylor Rouviere
Directors: Dean Colin Marcial and Brett Potter
It seems to be a theme in my life the past couple of weeks, the ocean. I just finished reading Nick Cutter’s THE DEEP, and this morning watched the 9:13 short horror film SEA DEVIL from writers/directors Dean Colin Marcial and Brett Potter. Well, I watched 9 minutes and 13 seconds of what had to be the START of SEA DEVIL. Given that “ending”, I have to assume this was just a bad edit and the complete version of the film is online somewhere? Seriously? THAT was the ending they went with? Um…
SEA DEVIL (2014) is about an American fishing boat that smuggles Cuban refugees into the country under the guise of, well, a fishing boat. They pick up their refugees, in this case a father and daughter, then go to their spot, drop anchor, and they fish. They teach the refugees how to fish, too, to complete the ruse should anyone come along asking questions.
SPOILERS
This particular time, though, what they haul up is bigger than a shrimp. There’s a man, missing both legs and a hand, covered in barnacles, who says in a language they don’t understand, “Put me back.”
Instead, the captain plans to dump him on a dock when they reach land, someone will find him before dawn. In the end, the father and daughter board an inflatable raft and start to paddle away from the boat. They don’t get very far before … something starts to rise out of the ocean, but before we get even a halfway decent glimpse of it, CREDITS. You know how some artists will stop a song right in the middle of a word—Trent Reznor’s done it a time or two on various Nine Inch Nails songs—leaving the listener feeling unfulfilled and incomplete? That’s the end of SEA DEVIL.
END SPOILERS
Just give me another 2-3 minutes so I can see what’s going to happen. Granted, it’s not going to satisfy my curiosity about the barnacle man or why the captain went into the water when the barnacle man said, “She’s coming for me.” There are so many unanswered questions here, I HAVE to believe this is just the first part of a longer piece.
Because if it’s not, then Marcial and Potter have no idea what makes a good short story. Not every short needs a perfect resolution, but if you’re going to ask a lot of questions, you have to at least hint at the answers, and that two seconds of something coming up from the water at the end is NOT a hint at an answer; it’s just five more questions. It MIGHT be if we saw more than the top five inches of it as it emerges, but as it is, that could have been a mound of garbage floating up to the surface, or it could have been the top of the head of a creature so large we can’t even fathom its true size. I’m leaning toward the latter, but, seriously, as much as we saw of it, it easily could have been the former and we’ll never know because they ended it just as it was getting interesting.
SEA DEVIL is ALL questions with NO satisfactory answers and that’s not good enough.
And it’s really a shame, too, because visually, the film looks great, has a really good soundtrack for being so short, the acting is better than anything I could ever manage, and the effects (the barnacle man) are convincing as hell. This SHOULD have been one of the good ones. But instead they really dropped the ball and everything else they were carrying with that ending.
I showed this to my wife, and her response in those last seconds was the same as mine when I first saw it, “Wait, that’s it???”
I don’t recommend SEA DEVIL, you’re just going to come away feeling like you need to watch something else, ANYTHING else, just to get SOME kind of resolution to anything at all. Skip this and just go to whatever you would have followed it with; that one is sure to be way more satisfying, no matter what you pick. If, however, you have nothing but time and want to give this a watch anyway, you can do so for free (thank God), on YouTube.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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