Splash is an absolutely idiotic film that has garnered considerable critical and vast popular acclaim. Yet it is a mere steal from and vulgarization of Andersen’s immortal “The Little Mermaid,” a tragic tale of heartbreaking loveliness. If you haven’t read that one lately, do so, and forget this stupid movie.
As a small boy, Allen Bauer takes a boat trip off Cape Cod with his parents and callow brother, Freddie, who is only interested in looking up women’s skirts. Allen looks down into the water, sees something beautiful there, and jumps in, but is promptly pulled out. Gazing after the receding boat is the frustrated, sad child mermaid who almost clasped him to her bosom. Years later, Allen runs the family wholesaleproduce business in New York City while Freddie has turned into a fat, wisecracking, lazy playboy. By a series of desperate plot contrivances, Allen ends up almost drowning off Cape Cod again, where a crazy young scientist, Kornbluth, is now tracking a mermaid. Who should rescue Allen but the mermaid from his childhood, whom, in most unchivalrous fashion, he has completely forgotten. But he is greatly aroused by his rescuer, blonde and nude (though her nakedness is pretty efficiently bowdlerized by long tresses and sometimes even a body stocking —the film, after all, was released by the Disney people), who kisses him passionately and then, for no good reason, leaves him there on the beach as she carries off his wallet to her submarine habitat, which looks like an only slightly waterlogged Swiss chalet.
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