When Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water came out to rave reviews in 2017, I was so completely transfixed with the simple language of lush storytelling and dramatic fantasy about a mute, lovelorn woman who impossibly falls in love with a semi-magical gill-man.
 
Sadly, most of my then-colleagues called it — and, frankly, still call it — “the fish-fucking movie.” From that moment on, I realized my tastes probably will differ from others’. But The Criterion Collection ’s new disc willfully transcends all the insults and barbs the film was given; The Shape of Water goes beyond monster-movie milieu, invigorating and reenergizing the creature feature for the new-ish millennium.
 
And, of course, it’s just a damn good movie.
 
With the sheer eroticism of the Creature from the Black Lagoon grasping at Julie Adams’ legs, The Shape of Water distills the essence with the voiceless Elisa (the lithe Sally Hawkins) in Cold War-era 1962. Trudging through life as a janitor in a secret government laboratory, she comes upon the lab’s new capture: a South American amphibian man (the emotive Doug Jones).

Trapped in the lab, the gill-man is put through tests and brutal exercises to determine his usefulness as a weapon, mostly administered by the sadistic Strickland (a wholly affecting performance from Michael Shannon). During this horrific tribulation, Elisa falls in love with the Gill-man — it’s a fish out of water story, literally.
 
With help from her working-class friends, Elisa breaks him out and tries to hide him until the tide comes in. As their passion intensifies, the gill-man gets sicker without the ocean to revive him, only to learn their love is more than natural and, in the end, supernatural.
 
Without a doubt, this movie took del Toro from the horror-film loving character behind Hellboy and Pacific Rim, as well as the Mexican-lensed The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, into the realm of fantastic world cinema. The success of The Shape of Water led to four Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture Oscars. For once, I was right!
 
The film captures not only the weighty, yet weightless feeling of dangerously falling in love, but how to deal with the mindless automatons who automatically try to dissuade you. From the homophobic clerk at lunch to the buttoned-down brownshirt who craves cruelty, the problem is them, not you.
 
As The Shape of Water literally and metaphorically challenges conventions, it creates a beautiful world where love always wins out — even in the deep dark sea. At least that’s what I believe. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Questionably competent kickboxing attorney Darby (Brey Noelle, Nightmare Neighborhood Moms) has a new roomie. It’s her shitty dad (Jim Azelvandre, The Exorcism of Saint Patrick), an aggressively repugnant human being who looks like a Factory 2-U version of J.K. Simmons.

One morning, instead of bragging to his daughter about the scent on his hand after a sexual encounter, he’s uncharacteristically sharing positive words and breakfast burritos. As Darby confides to her bartending best friend (KateLynn E. Newberry, Juror #2), it’s as if her father’s been pod-peopled. 

Because, duh, he has; the title out front shoulda told ya. 

I watched Replicator by virtue of I See You appearing among writer/director Mark Andrew Hamer’s IMDb credits. That 2019 sleeper is gripping, thrilling, chilling and, sad to say, other things this chunk of weird science is not. The two films exist on different planes of skill and execution … which made sense once I read more carefully: Hamer served as an executive producer of that film versus the pure creative force here.

Still, Replicator deserves to be judged on its own, not how it stands against something else. Awash in visually pleasant purples and pinks, it strives for a pulp greasiness that Hamer’s dialogue is too jokey to meet. Even if it were, Newberry would be the only cast member I’d trust to do it justice because as is, her fellow actors don’t perform as much as recite — and stiffly at that.

Aside from the impressive oozing, gooey effects — most notably the wall of throbbing scabs, veins, tumors, whatever — the movie falls short of its elements’ collective ambition. Not just by a mile, but the next town over. One character says it best with a rhetorical “Are we really doing this right now?”

They are, but you can skip it, unless bellybutton tentacle protrusions are your thing. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.