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Review: ’47 Meters Down: Uncaged’ Is a Tense, Ghastly, Shark Sequel
Good sequels are hard to come by. It’s always hard to come up with a good follow up, having a new angle to keep the concept fresh. But I can say that 47 Meters Down: Uncaged is a great sequel to the original and even surpasses it.
The story follows step-sisters Mia (Sophie Nélisse) and Sasha (Corinne Foxx) who have recently moved to Mexico and attend an international school together. Mia is bullied and Sasha has trouble bonding with her new sibling. Mia’s father is an archaeologist diver who has recently discovered sunken Meso-American ruins and is digging his way through with a team. The girls along with their friends Alexa (Brianne Tju) and Nicole (Sistine Stallone) decide to check out a portion of the city that was excavated and commandeer some diving equipment. The sunken city is beautiful and holds ancient relics… as well as some very hungry albino sharks! Now, the quartet must try and survive and find away to escape the underwater kingdom or end up permanent residents.
Director/writer of the original 47 Meters Down Johannes Roberts returns and it seems he’s learned some lessons form his original claustrophobic shark thriller as well as adding an interesting new environment/angle. The ancient underwater city setting is a unique place for the horror and adds an interesting edge to the aquatic terror. Aged and faded statues line the backgrounds of almost every scene and are quite haunting mixed with the sunken architecture. The girls having to evade the sharks amidst the falling walls makes it a claustrophobic experience.
The sharks themselves are frightening with their unique style: they’re albino cave sharks! Pale white with dead, blind eyes. They sense by sound in the dark and just look way freakier than the average great white. Like shark versions of Gollum. All adding to the signature jump scares that the previous film established. I jumped out of my seat during a particularly intense shark surprise! I can’t help but make some connections to Jaws 2 which itself felt like a slasher movie where the shark was in an almost Jason Voorhees’ like role, and this is similar in that regard. the way the sharks stalk their victims follows the kind of beats of a slasher movie which adds to the horror.
47 Meters Down: Uncaged is mostly an improved sequel and would serve as a great companion piece to the similarly themed Crawl in terms of claustrophobic creature features, but it does have its flaws. The dialogue is majorly cheesy with lots of characters saying how they feel rather than letting the terror role. Aside from Mia and Sasha’s sisterly relationship, the rest of the characters are kind of 1-dimensional or serve as victims or supporting characters.
Overall, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged is a successful follow up to the original with an interesting premise and a distinct setting to set it apart from the deluge of shark horror movies. Well worth taking a dive and seeing the ghostly sharks in this haunted city!
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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments
It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.
We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.
“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”
That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”
Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:
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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening
Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.
Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.
Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.
Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.
Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.
The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.
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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date
Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.
Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.
These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:
According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”
Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.
Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.
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