IT’S TIME to reset every image you ever had of mermaids.
Those who grew up with “The Little Mermaid,” forget that. In fact, forget every mermaid in every animated cartoon, all those amazingly cute creatures with the long flowing hair.
All you guys of a certain age — and you know who you are — forget Daryl Hannah in “Splash.”
“Mermaids: The Body Found,” the showcase feature of Animal Planet’s “Monster Week” that launches Monday, starts from the premise mermaids really could exist, or maybe even do.
Unfortunately, it never quite gets over the threshold where most of us viewers would be likely to buy either of those notions.
Still, credit the producers with a bold concept in the hi-tech CGI imagery they use to envision these hypothetical mermaids.
They don’t go for Daryl Hannah. They don’t even go for cute. They go for creepy. Really, really, really creepy.
These mermaids have the fish tails and the long hair. But their faces are more like the faces of cavewomen who are only partway along the evolutionary chain to modern-day land-dwelling humans.
They have bulging cheekbones and large angry eyes set in what seems to be a perpetual scowl.
They look like refugees from a sci-fi horror movies, like creatures that would rise from the deep in the dead of night and drag you underwater to feed to their young.
Ironically, this show also postulates that mermaids are exceedingly shy, which explains why, in the tens of thousands of years they’ve been swimming around, no one has ever seen one.
That is, until a mysterious set of remains washed up onto a beach in Washington and a couple of young boys saw it.
But before they could tell the world, the government got to them and persuaded them they didn’t really see anything at all.
At this point, then, “Mermaids” sets its scientific argument on a side burner and focuses instead on the old reliable path of conspiracy - that the government knows all about this phenomenon and has instituted a massive coverup.
We even get the alleged former government agent who explains it all — how the government is conducting secret tests involving underwater sonic weaponry and how it sometimes kills whales or dolphins and in this case may have killed a mermaid, too.
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