Deadly Water

What if I told you this low-budget sea monster movie was so "off," I would have sworn it was shot in South Africa, which has given us many very bad sea creature flicks. It apparently was shot in Canada, which I still find hard to believe -- not that most Canadian-lensed flicks aren't just as abysmal. Two groups of people are after a treasured artifact, which is guarded by a giant squid. The two groups come to blows, but in the end the squid takes care of a lot of them. The only "name" actor is TV thespian Jack Scalia, who has seen better days. So has the director, who gave us the surreal and sublime THE GATE back in the day. I just can't get over how odd this movie feels. In a very small way, the plot resembles that of THE DEEP. However, it is not worth watching, unless you're having trouble sleeping.

This movie has nothing going for it all. It is another jaws rip-off involving a squid instead of a shark, and what is worse is that it has already been done before. If it wasn't $2, I wouldn't have bought it.

That said, I enjoyed it. The most interesting parts were not involving the squid at all - it is more about the treasure hunts and the race to find the opal. If only the characters' motivations were a bit more convincing - especially the villains.

The Squid itself? Pretty average CGI, but what could you really do without a huge budget for this sort of thing. However, there is some surprisingly convincingly violent scenes in there.

Anyway, if you are in the mood for monster flicks, this does the job.

"Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep" is an all-right creature feature.

**SPOILERS**

Off the coast of, a diving crew, Nicole, (Victoria Pratt) Jenny, (Kristi Angus) and Michael, (Cory Montkeith) find a collection of sunken ships from throughout different time periods sunk in the area. Ray, (Charlie O'Connell) hears this and offers his help. After going on a dive, they are attacked by a giant squid, and barely make it back. Maxwell Odemus, (Jack Scalia) an old rival of Nicole's, arrives and offers a reluctant Nicole a proposition about the creature. After finding the true nature of the treasure found earlier, the two teams race to find it before being killed by the protective squid.

The Good News: As far as giant squid movies go, this one wasn't all that bad. The best aspect is that it decides not to spend all the time on the creature and instead weaves into the lives of others, rather than just being stuck over a single night of carnage. It takes place over a couple days, and that's a rare sight for a film like this. It was also a pretty nice idea to not make it just a biological mutation and was instead just a regular creature. That makes for a far more believable monster. The underwater action is all great, combining to make some great moments. The first attack near the wreck is pretty suspenseful, as it's hard to really get a sense of what's going on in the scene and there's an air that something isn't quite right. It's one of the few scenes around that features a similar idea that's successfully executed right, making the suspense out of what is on-screen through the elements presented. The second dive does the suspense to a much lesser degree, but it makes up for it with the addition of a couple kills and some gore to the mix that is a little welcome. The few non-dragging deaths in here was also nice, but it's only too bad that it hardly ever happened.

The Bad News: Frankly, this one suffers from one nagging problem that all similar films suffer from; the use of bad, cheap, phony looking CGI to render the monster. It looks very bad, hardly ever meshes with the actors on the screen, and doesn't really gel with the general rest of the film. It even changes sizes a couple times, making it less of threat. It really should be stopped. The only other really big gripe with the film is that it has a majority of deaths that just involve pulling someone under the water. Most of the kills are done that way, and it really didn't do a lot to establish a general feel for the creature. a couple of different methods would've made it a little more of a frightening creature. There's still a couple of other little moments in here that didn't work or were examples of the usual disregard for logic, plot, continuity or whatever else the Sci-Fi Channel's originals are consistently missing, which are in abundance here as well.

The Final Verdict: It's a pretty decent film, but there's still some decent work in there along the way. The biggest thing is that the killer in the film isn't all that threatening, which can really destroy many films. Had that been fixed, it would've been an alright film at best.

Rated : Violence and some language

I've never read JAWS by Peter Benchley but have of course seen the movie andJAWS is considered to be one of the few films that improves greatly onthe book . Much of this I'm told is to do with a large number of subplots being jettisoned in the adaptation , leaving only the main plot of a man eating shark and of the protagonists mission to kill it . One can't help thinking the producers of this movie should have done something similar

The major problem is that much of the running time is taken up with a bunch of bad guys wanting to get their hands on a very expensive Greek opal . In many ways the story resembles another Benchley story THE DEEP which might not be a problem as such but when you've got a film called KRAKEN:TENTACLES OF THE DEEP then a prospective audience is expecting a giant squid to be the focus of the story rather than humans . The producers seem aware of this shoehorning a squid attack just to remind the audience there's a squid central to the plot when in fact it's the producers themselves who obviously need reminding

As it's produced by Nu Image Films the production values are rather poor with the squid being a rather obvious CGI creation . Like nearly every film featuring a giant squid it makes a roaring sound ( Squids are mute ) and can grab people off the decks of ships ( Considered impossible by leading scientists ) and of course when someone gets devoured underwater there's a big bubble of blood rising to the surface . Not only that but biologists are all in their early twenties , have blonde hair and walk around in bikini tops thereby exposing their admirable mammary glands . One can't help thinking Nu Image Films and The Sci-Fi channel are in cahoots to get more guys to sign up to university science classes . I doubt however if anyone who worked on this film would be able to spell the word science

but I watched the whole thing. Unfortunately full of errors regarding diving as my daughter kept commenting on throughout the movie.

Charlie O'Connell is definitely not the actor his brother is (not that his brother is a great actor). The Kraken was not much of a scare. I hated the underwater shots where it was hard to tell the difference between the good and bad guys. The best part of the movie was the jokes we made about it. Watch it if nothing else is on but don't have any expectations about quality. The tentacles of the Kraken are supposedly razor sharp but they only cut some of the time. The ending sucked the big enchilada. You gotta give the folks at SciFi some credit, they keep churning out these films so we can relive the whole B-movie thing of the 50's.