Having seen "Wet Gold" in a movie theater in the Netherlands as a child, I can attest to the fact that this wasn't originally a "made for tv" production. For Brooke Shields to star in a tv movie at the height of her career wouldn't make much sense. This lushly filmed, old school adventure movie, looked absolutely stunning on the big screen, with it's deep blue color compositions and the capable widescreen photography, couldn't look less like a tv movie. Also stunning is Shields, who at age 20, looked more beautiful in this film than in anything she did previously, probably due to the natural makeup and settings. She plays "Laura," a put upon waitress, who is distressed with a life of all work and no money. She plays the part in her usual breathy, air-headed style, which is actually quite endearing here. Playing opposite to Shields is the always wonderful Burgess Meredith, as local drunk "Samson," who dazzles Brooke's character with stories of a shipwreck that he survived, decades before...a shipwreck that left millions of dollars worth of gold bars on the ocean's floor. Rounding up her boyfriend, ( a sexy, hairy chested Thomas Byrd, who appears in a full-frontal nude scene which seems to have been cut for video release) and hiring a pro diver, (the seemingly unsavory Brian Kerwin, who has more on his mind than making a few bucks on this expedition,) the crew head out to sea to find their fortune. And is as usual in this case, the promise of unimaginable wealth begins to change each member of the crew, sometimes in dark and sinister ways.
"Wet Gold" is a technically very well-made movie, featuring glorious cinematography, including some stunning underwater photography. The pacing is brisk, with new plot developments happening at every turn, and the character development is good enough to make the audience think they know each member of the boating party, only to be surprised at who turns out to be the good guys and who becomes the most corrupted by the gold. Of course this is apparently an updating of an earlier film, "Treasure of the Sierra Madre," but the target audience in 1985 would not typically know, or care about a film from 1948. Much like another Brooke Shields vehicle, "Sahara," "Wet Gold" is a movie created in the old fashioned style of films from a more innocent time, when movies provided a sense of escapist fantasy out of fantastic, larger than life adventure stories, while dazzling the audience with beautiful people and exotic settings. This is exactly what "Wet Gold" is. It even makes the classic, time worn statement about the evils of greed and what it can do to otherwise decent people. The cult status this flick has is understandable and well deserved. A Bluray restoration would be welcomed, and compared to the current low quality prints available, seeing this gorgeous film in high definition widescreen format, would be a revelation.
