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16) A STAR IS BORN and 17) INTERIORS Water as invitation to suicide. James Mason (Judy Garland's washed-up husband) and Geraldine Page (the perfectionist wife and mother of Interiors) walk into the sea, never to return. As if leaving an ocean lying around is not unlike keeping a loaded pistol on the coffee table--sooner or later, someone's going to pull the trigger.
18) WATERWORLD and 19) SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL Water as career suicide.
20) THE ABYSS and 21) TITANIC Director James Cameron is the anti-Kathie Lee Gifford. While the siren Gifford's TV commercials beckon vacationers to join her floating fun, Cameron is Neptune with a grudge, punishing anyone dumb enough to board his ships of fools. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, star of The Abyss, also appears this summer in 22) THE PERFECT STORM. She's jinxed, matey!
23) THE BLUE LAGOON This soft-core tale of desert-island puberty is so boring in its debauchery you'll actually miss your high school.
24) THE RIVER WILD In this Rocky Mountain rafting movie, Meryl Streep's brood is terrorized by creepy criminals on the lam. What kind of mother is she? Doesn't she know that proper family vacations take place in a car?
25) ORDINARY PEOPLE The theme of Robert Redford's directorial debut is that boating rips families apart. After Conrad (Timothy Hutton) fails to save his big brother in a storm on Lake Michigan, he attempts suicide. After he returns home from the mental institution, his coldly chipper mom (Mary Tyler Moore) is speaking for herself when she complains, "I don't think people want to be with him." Conrad blames himself for his brother's death, even though the real murderers are the droves of psychopathic molecules composed of two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. He does quit the swim team, though it's too little, too late.