Fishtales (2007)

When Thomas takes a trip to Greece with his daughter, he expects a relaxed holiday from his troubles back home. Instead, things get complicated when he falls in love with a beautiful mermaid and battles an evil sea captain's plot to bring in the ultimate catch. Hailed by audiences as the great comedy catch of the year, Fishtales is a fun, quirky story the whole family can enjoy!

Only worth it for mermaid fans.

I was excited with this purchase because I'm a huge mermaid fan, and hearing that a film had been created with Billy Zane in it seemed to indicate that some quality would be associated with the film.

Unfortunately it was not so.

Billy Zane, though a competent actor with I think he best role being in Dead Calm, was insufferable in this film. I disliked looking at his bumbling character that had little to no character development that was believable. The story is messy, and uninteresting.

The Mermaid character was lovely to see in the water when swimming, but the tail would crinkle and bend in the most unattractive of places, breaking the form. The tail is bumpy and not a nice shape, however the fin is nicely conceived and colored. The mermaid had scales over her breasts which looked silly. I think a nice top made of natural items would have been more pleasing and presentable.

It introduces some new mermaid lore specific to the story, but doesn't play out well. Of interest, there was a book the characters referred to with paintings by David Delamare. His artwork looked nice and should have featured more. Certainly the book and the information within should have been better utilized, but it was really just set dressing that was handled by the characters with little information coming from it.

The actress playing the mermaid character was just wrong for the part. I could see that she would be great in other roles, but this role was not gelling.

The strongest performer was the actress that played the daughter of Billy Zane. She was the only character whom I believed.

There was a subplot of a local fisherman who was hunting the mermaid for her jeweled tail and her stash of treasure, but it was clumsy and broke the flow of the film.

The cover image on the DVD cover was very pixellated making the characters and writing hard to read, thus it looked like an illegal copy with the image coming from a unofficial sources.

I bought it because it had a mermaid in it, and I'll probably only watch it again to show another fan of mermaids. Only worth it for other mermaid fans. September 24, 2008

My kids give it 5 stars

There's lots of mermaid movies these days. We rented this one with Ariel's new cartoon, and the kids loved it. The premise: a American professor, a classicist, at Oxford is sent on a leave of absense to a romantic, Greek island to complete his research or lose his position. His young daughter accompanies him, and as is in most of these tales, Mama is deceased. But they love each other and have lots of fun wherever they go(some similarites to "Nim's Island"). On the island, the daughter is befriended by a beautiful "goddess", aka, mermaid, and they swim and frolic and chit-chat about life, love, being human and helping her dad with his work and perhaps his lovelife. Meanwhile, Dad struggles to translate an ancient, Greek parchment, and is beseiged by a local matchmaker and her girls. A crusty fisherman(Alki David, who also wrote, directed and overacted in the movie) and his cute son seek to discover and capture the mermaid.

From an adult perspective, it has it's Ok moments, but jumps much too much back and forth between what is reasonable, and what is totally loony. But overall, it wasn't boring for us, and we enjoyed our children's reactions.

It's filmed in England and Greece; the actors deliver for their silly roles: Billy Zane plays the father as a goofy, afraid of the water, but caring nerd; Amber Savva(daughter Serena) is super. There's lots of slapstick and pre-adolescent humor; the camera work is beautiful with the underwater and island scenes; we liked the music, especially with the first mermaid encounter, shot like a music-video.

And what about the mermaid? She convinced my two pre-school girls that they exist. Woo-hoo. The actress(Kelly Brook, who starred with Billy Zane in another island movie, 'Survivor Island' and share an off screen, bumpy relationship) is a bit stilted but pretty. I guess that's appropriate for goddess-mermaids. The costume's less revealing than Darryl Hannah's. Plus, there's no language, no sex, and only mild peril.

As a 'big person', I'd give it a 2 to 3 stars mainly because the story's so eclectic and unpolished. (Some reviews really trashed this flick.) But for the kids, it's a definite 5 stars! And we, as two disparaging adults, can sit through most of it without snoozing or total, brain cell atrophy and share our kids' laughs.

September 2, 2008

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