Today's viewing is of two very different movies involving merpeople. The first one is The Lure (2015) is about two mermaid sisters who come ashore in Poland for adventures among the humans, and who become strippers and back-up singers in a sleazy nightclub. The movie is a visual delight, but often seems all over the place, often to the point of losing sight of what it wants to be. Even through all of the distraction there are two parallel plot threads which hold it all together. The mermaids depicted straddle to line between Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid and the more monstrous mermaids of folklore. Silver, tragically, falls in love with the bass player of the band, and goes to horrible lengths to obtain true womanhood from the waist down, while Golden becomes increasingly consumed with hostility as her sister grows apart from her, and she finds it harder and harder to resist her own vampiric urges to feed on the humans who only want to exploit them.
As a horror-musical, The Lure is certainly not for everyone, but it's compelling to watch in its novelty. Marta Mazurek and Michelina Olszanska are riveting as the mermaid sisters, at once vulnerable and threatening, but always sympathetic.
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