Kraken: Os Tentáculos das Profundezas

Thirty years ago, Ray Reiter (Charlie O'Connell) witnessed the death of his parents by the kraken. Determined to avenge their murders, he joins a perilous high seas expedition that brings him face to face with the kraken, the guardian of the Greek Opal. Oh, and there is a crime lord involved in here somewhere, too.

This film is pretty awful. It looks like it was made for the SyFy network (and probably was), and its star power is Charlie O'Connell, the cheap version of Jerry O'Connell with a nastier voice. There is a part where they are looking for a Trojan mask. I have no idea how it got underwater, or how they had photos of it before it was surfaced (although two others exist).

Product placement from Diet Pepsi. How Pepsi felt this in any way helped their image is beyond me.

The soft pop rock totally not necessary... takes away from the film, which would have been better with a non-vocal score.

Christa Campbell appears, but this does not save the film.

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

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.

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.

Not a bad story, but the low budget rears its ugly head at times to undermine the effectiveness of the movie. A lot of the plot is predictable, but the film moves quickly and takes some time to introduce characters so you at least have some involvement and know what's going on. An illustration of the low budget is when a motor boat is "destroyed," you only see this as a CGI image from a distance. (No boats were harmed during the filming of this movie.) I also love the "metal mask," that looks like a pie-tin mold.

It's another big-sea-creature-on-the-loose story, but this one actually has an unusual motive for its vicious brutality (not simply hunger), a plot twist often absent in these made-for-TV flicks. The human characters are two teams of scientific artifacts treasure hunters (sort of an aquatic version of Raiders of the Lost Ark), and they're both after the same artifact. The bad guys all wear black so you know they're the bad guys; the baddest of the baddies (and the leader) always wears black suits, even though all the action is at a beach or on the water. Every line of dialog this guy has is a threat to somebody; they could have put a sign up saying "Generic Theat in Progress" whenever he shows up. The good guys wear other colors, even in their scuba gear so you know who's who during underwater fight scenes. The creature's inevitable attacks predictably interrupt these fights, and provide for other common monster movie clichés.

Certainly not a landmark film, but OK for a watch if you like these sea monster movies, or if you have nothing better to do.