Watchlist Warrior: Water Monster 2

Hello! I have not been putting anything on Substack lately. This is partly because I’ve been working on other things and partly because I just can’t think of anything I really want to write about. In an attempt to artificially generate inspiration and to be a little less precious I am going to become the Watchlist Warrior. At least once. No promises.

At the time of writing this, my watchlist on Letterboxd has 2,335 movies on it. The majority of these movies I do not recognize or remember adding. In a two-pronged assault on watcher’s indecision and writer’s block, I will be shuffling my watchlist and selecting a movie to watch and write about from the first row. The less popular, the better. Let’s plumb the depths. I will not cheat, and if I do cheat, I will not tell you. I am the Watchlist Warrior.

Okay, I fired up Letterboxd and hit shuffle on my watchlist. Today I set my sights on the middle option here, a Chinese movie from 2019 called The Water Monster. I made this fun little graphic, found an English subtitled upload of the movie on YouTube, and began to watch. Imagine my dismay when about an hour in I realized the video was mistitled and I was actually watching 2021’s Water Monster 2, the sequel. Well, I was too far in to switch gears, so this is what we’re doing today. The inaugural Watchlist Warrior segment will be about a movie that wasn’t even on my watchlist. Nothing goes right for me.

Water Monster 2 follows Du Qingling, a forensic doctor investigating the disappearance of her brother. Her search takes her to Shangshui Town, a swampy village whose residents live in terror of a mythical creature known as the Water Monkey, which they also revere as a god. Doctor Du finds herself very unwelcome; it is believed that “antagonizing the Water Monkey is a sure way to die” (a quote that echoes in flashback a few times). Nevertheless, she probes the town for clues about her brother’s disappearance and about the Water Monkey. Guess what? She finds both of those things.

The first third of this movie is thick with atmosphere. I can’t say I really had any meaningful expectations about what a movie called Water Monster would be like, besides the obvious assumption it would contain a water monster. That said, I definitely didn’t expect the folk horror vibe that’s present here. The beginning of Water Monster 2 is almost like the Wicker Man, except it’s set in China and the swamp.

Shangshui Town is nice and creepy. There’s fetid nasty water and strange rituals and locals who say things like “Lord Water Monkey will be displeased!” The town kind of looks like a bayou. Can you use the word bayou for a swamp that’s not in the US? It’s a good location for a movie like this, and it’s fun to watch the initial plot unfold. The locals claim that Doctor Du’s brother tried to learn the secrets of the Water Monkey, which caused it to become angry and kill him and everybody who helped him. Doctor Du and her newfound sidekick Little Liu, a boy whose whole family was killed by the Water Monkey, try to get to the bottom of the mystery. It’s a lot of surly and gruff villagers telling Doctor Du she needs to leave, interspersed with the slimy half-seen Water Monkey killing those who aid her investigation.

Right when I started to get bored, around the thirty-minute mark, the movie suddenly and loudly became an action movie for a second. There’s a very kinetic fight scene where the Water Monkey shoots around the screen like a bouncy ball and Doctor Du shoots at it with a cool gun. I thought this was going to be the rest of the movie and got excited, but things soon settled down again. A group of anti-Monkey Shangshui Towners go against the leadership of the town to help Doctor Du construct some Indiana Jones style traps to catch the creature. There were a few more sequences peppered throughout where the Water Monkey flew around and bit people and such, but overall the whole thing started to drag and even lost the foreboding swampy atmosphere I was so fond of. There’s a lot of death in the movie, but most of it takes place offscreen or over an abrupt cut to black. That’s China for you I guess. You can imply a Water Monkey ripped someone’s head off but not show it.

Doctor Du does eventually find out what’s really going on in Shangshui Town. I’m going to avoid spoilers here. I do think it’s insanely unlikely that anybody is going to read this and run out to watch Water Monster 2. I also think it would be crazy if somebody got mad because I said what happened at the end. I’m going to stick to my principles though. You never know. What I will say is that there are some truly shocking and unexpected revelations about the provenance and purpose of the Water Monkey. Would I have seen them coming if I had watched the first Water Monster movie? It’s certainly possible. It’s kind of crazy I didn’t realize I was watching a sequel until an hour in, but in my defense this seems to be a standalone Water Monkey story.

If it feels like I’m saying the words Water Monkey a lot in this review you should see how many times they say it in the movie. Every character is always talking about the Water Monkey. It is kind of funny they called the movie Water Monster instead of Water Monkey but I get it. Not sure if Water Monkey gets butts in seats. The Water Monkey itself is a nasty little creature. It seems to be about the size of a kindergartner and is slimy and pockmarked. It crawls around and can jump really fast. I thought based on the poster it would be a Creature from the Black Lagoon situation but it honestly looks and sounds more like Gollum. I kind of can’t believe the villagers of Shangshui Town revere this thing as a god. It’s so small and gross.

My primary experience with mainland Chinese film is stuff like Snow Monster vs Ice Shark and Snake 3: Dinosaur vs Python. I always like to imagine these movies are first- or second-tier blockbusters over there, that you could watch Tiger Plague in a packed-out multiplex if you wanted to. Most of the weird Chinese “blockbusters” I’ve seen are like 85% the same as The Meg 2, and that was directed by Ben Wheatley, so I figure there must be some cultural heft somewhere in there. I do think it’s more likely stuff like this is Redbox-tier chaff. But I really don’t know, and I honestly don’t want to find out. It’s more fun to imagine Water Monster 2 had an IMAX release at one point.

The thing I admire most about Chinese blockbusters is the way they do pastiche. They’re not afraid to toe the line between homage and replication. It’s like there’s a switch they’re flipping every 10 minutes. Now you’re watching Jurassic Park. Now you’re watching Star Wars. Okay, now it’s Wreck It Ralph. I think American blockbusters tend to prefer their pastiche as more of a freeform mélange, like the movie equivalent of that YouTube video where they mash up all the songs that use the same four chords. But in China they’re not afraid to nakedly take you through the greatest hits even if they don’t quite hang together. I think a perfect synthesis of the two sensibilities would be the way Avatar: The Way of Water deftly hops from Moby Dick to The Abyss to Titanic while feeling cohesive and continuous. Another example might be Beyond Skyline’s insane parallel action climaxes in vastly different scales and genres. Oh man and now I’m thinking about the part in Rebirth of Mothra II where a bunch of tiny Mothras fly inside Dagahra’s body and start having a Star Wars dogfight.

I could only find this scene in this shitty quality. But look how fucking sick this is. Mothra transforms into a bunch of mini clones and flies inside of Dagahra and starts blowing up these evil little starfish. It’s literally X-Wings. This shit is so awesome. And Rebirth of Mothra II isn’t even that great of a movie.

Anyway, none of what I was just talking about is really fully relevant to Water Monster 2. To get back on track: When Doctor Du takes out her musket (or whatever that gun is) and starts taking potshots at the Water Monkey I was primed to switch subgenres and enter the next phase. It really bummed me out when there was no next phase to enter.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the structure of genre movies, and how a good one should try and outpace the viewer’s acclimation to its premise. I think pulling the rug out from under the audience in terms of what is happening on the screen is very important and needs to happen at least twice. Once a premise has crystallized in a viewer’s brain, especially in a horror movie, it’s really easy for pretty much anyone to plot out the general beats of what’s going to happen next. So if you really want to maximize enjoyment for the entire runtime you need to time it out and zag just about ten seconds after the audience realizes you’ve been zigging.

A good example of the three-act rug pull might be Barbarian. A lot of the best genre movies are three movies in one. I thought about that a lot during Water Monster 2 because Water Monster 2 is just barely one movie in one. The version of WM2 in my imagination that was somewhere in the realm of Wicker Man meets Dagon meets, like, Prey materialized just enough on the screen to disappoint me when it didn’t fully reach fruition. Maybe this is too high a standard to impose on a seemingly direct-to-YouTube sequel, but I’ve come to believe over the years that all movies deserve to be taken seriously.

I’ve been mostly dumping on Water Monster 2, but it’s not a bad movie. Just kind of generally mediocre. There are good moments for sure, and I would not call it entirely predictable by any stretch. I could not have guessed while watching the first act’s dark and moody investigation that I would later be seeing the revoltingly scabrous Water Monkey rescue a caveful of child slaves from a watery grave. And a lot of the movie looks pretty good. Or at least I think it does, it was hard to tell through the YouTube compression. Much of it is very dark and gray though. I have to imagine that Water Monster 2 is a worse version of The Water Monster. Maybe one day I will find out if that is true. But not today…

Two stars.

Thanks for reading. You can probably expect more of this. Also, thank you to josiah hughes, whose very fun Bandcamp Roulette posts inspired this. Go read his blog it’s great.