Okay. Escape: Aqua Terror is...weird. Weirder than the other Horma films, I mean. On the surface, it would seem to be an alien invasion story a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In fact, the main, well, "villain" does take over people with, as the movie poster states, "a single drop of water." But it becomes...so much weirder.
Alright, here goes: it starts in some sort of government facility that's listed as the "Topography Genera Center." The Topography Genera Center has been doing all sorts of sundry experiments and one of them has to do with the titular "aqua terror," which is called, bear with me, Fossil-Type EVOLUTIONARY ADVERSE TRIGGER. According to the scientists at the Center, it causes "acute obsession followed by absorption into a hive mind."
And then there's an accident and the Evolutionary Adverse Trigger is let loose on the world. Yeah. It's implied that some of the scientists are actually infected with it and let it loose intentionally, but it's never confirmed.
The movie then shows the spread of the Trigger. It basically replaces water with itself, so it eats up ponds and rivers and lakes and eventually spreads to the ocean. Which is when humanity becomes fucked. We see various scenes of people drinking water and then becoming obsessed over various things. And then we see them drowning themselves and rising up and becoming a part of the "hive mind."
Occasionally, the movie will cut back to the Topography Genera Center where the scientists are tracking the "spread of the infection." Oh, I should mention that there aren't any characters that we really follow through the movie. Well, except for the Trigger itself. That sort of...evolves. In the beginning, it's just this hive mind thing that takes people over. And then it starts doing these weird things, like causing everyone in a certain area to dance or have sex (well, I assume they had sex - since there were still censors, it only showed people start removing their clothes before it cut away). It experiments with people.
The end of the film...oh boy. Okay, at the end of the film, the entire world has been taken over by the Trigger. Even the scientists at the Topography Genera Center have been taken over -- we see them dancing with each other, all of them moving in the same motions over and over again. And then suddenly everyone stops. And they all turn to the camera. And they just...look at the camera.
This was certainly very different from all the other Horma films I've seen. Sort of a cross between Invasion of the Body Snatchers and a David Lynch film. Again, the only thing I didn't like was the end. If they had ended it with everyone dancing, that would have been fine - but the head turn to look at the camera? What was that about?
Fine. Next!
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