Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Scott Walker
Starring: Luciane Buchanan, Matt Whelan, Zara Nausbaum, Holly Shervey
Whenever a movie's protagonist receives a surprise inheritance of some real
estate with fixer-upper potential, there's always a catch. Said protagonist
will usually uncover a few family secrets previously kept hidden, and the
property will probably come with a ghost or two.
The Tank ticks these boxes but switches out spooks for
man-eating lizard creatures. That's where any originality ends though.
Presumably to avoid the horror storyteller's nemeses of cellphones and the
internet, writer/director Scott Walker sets his film in 1978. It's
also set in the US but the unconvincing accents betray it as a New Zealand
production (that distinctive Kiwi tendency of ending every sentence as
though it's a question is present throughout). Anyway, it's in this setting
that we find married couple Ben (Matt Whelan) and Jules (Luciane Buchanan). Crippled by debt and unpaid bills, they're struggling to keep their
California pet store afloat until Ben becomes the recipient of a classic
surprise inheritance. Seems his estranged mum, who passed away six months
prior, has left him an ocean front property on the Oregon coast.
Heading up the definitely not New Zealand coast with their young daughter
Reia (Zara Nausbaum) and the family dog, Ben and Jules find a home
that needs considerable work but boasts the sort of view that will make it
easy to flog. Deciding to stick around and give it a spit and polish, they
find some convenient expository newspaper clippings that reveal Ben's father
and sister may not have died in a car accident as he had always
believed.
But you're here for the monsters, not the family drama. Well, they arrive
via the property's water tank. Left dormant for years, Ben gets it up and
running again, and when he cuts himself and bleeds into the water, it
attracts the lizards back to the property via a series of subterranean
caves.
This being a New Zealand production, the creatures are of course designed
by WETA. It's refreshing to see old school rubbery monsters in this era of
Sharknado knockoffs and their awful CG, but the creature
design is disappointingly generic. The lizards look like every monster that
emerged in the wake of
Alien, with the obligatory mouth that looks suspiciously genital.
The movie's limited cast means there's a lack of kills, with only the
obligatory unlucky estate agent (one of the most cursed occupations in
horror cinema) and an inept cop acting as fodder for the monsters. After
much pleading with her hubby to get the hell out of dodge, Jules is left to
defend her family in the climax. Despite dispatching an armed cop in
seconds, the monsters are oddly ineffective against Jules, who seems to gain
super powers as soon as she strips down to a tight white vest to take them
on.
Taking place in the dark and underwater, the climactic scenes force the
audience to squint, but we've seen it all before, right down to a laughably
uninspired riff on the classic "Get away from her you bitch!" line. Perhaps
the biggest disappointment is that the dog never gets involved in the
action. If you put a dog in a monster movie there has to be a scene where
the plucky pooch squares up to the creature. Even
Meg 2
understood that rule.
The Tank is on Shudder UK/ROI from
November 10th.
