I’ve already seen a few monster movies based around the eternal, extremely generalized struggle of good vs. evil—see The Creeping Flesh—and also a few that do the same thing while also contrasting Christianity with pre-Christian beliefs—see Viy—so I was prepared for what Blood Tide had on offer. There is obviously something very Wicker Man about the set-up here: outsiders intruding into an isolated place where the old beliefs still hold sway, maybe inviting a terror upon themselves with their unwariness, maybe being pulled in by destiny—certainly they both have a village full of people who are maybe outside the mainstream and are thus entirely suspicious. Substitute the British Isles with the Greek Isles and have the human sacrifice come with a monster, and you’ve got a pretty good idea. Those themes and the choice of location provides an atmosphere for this movie, one that helps it straddle the line between early eighties horror schlock and maybe a more serious kind of horror schlock.
While it really looks like married couple Neil (Martin Kove, the bad guy karate teacher from The Karate Kid and Cobra Kai) and Sherry (Mary Louise Weller, also featured in Q) are on vacation, what with their fancy boat and bathing suits and what have you, that is only half true—they have come to a secluded Greek island to look for Neil’s artist sister Madeline (former Miss USA Deborah Shelton), who he had lost contact with. They manage to find her there alongside fellow Americans Frye (James Earl Jones) and his girlfriend Barbara (Lydia Cornell.) Apparently Madeline had convinced Frye, her fellow “amateur archaeologist” (which apparently means “person who wants to pick up old coins”), to come to the island, and since then her personality has gradually changed, especially after she began excavating some paintings on the walls of the local monastery, finding that beneath the traditional image of St. George slaying the dragon, there was another image of the dragon slaying another saint that apparently predates Christianity. There’s another…interesting…image beneath that one, too, but they’ll get to that.
Frye and Madeline’s big find was an underwater cave full of artifacts and a wall with a strange symbol on it, and Frye has no problem blowing it up while boozing up—blowing things up, drinking, and quoting Shakespeare seem to be the only things he enjoys, as he is quite belligerent otherwise (he pulls a knife on Neil as soon as he shows up), even towards Barbara, who he bosses around constantly. I mean, who wouldn’t be grumpy staying in that Mediterranean paradise where it’s sunny all the time and there are octopus tentacles hanging from the chandelier in your villa? Needless to say, that wall was there for a reason—a reason related to the opening flashback to scenes of human sacrifice, and those portraits that Madeline found.
The villagers trying their hardest to prevent the worst—while still refusing to explain anything until the last minute—are the ones who know English: Nereus (veteran actor José Ferrer), the mayor, and the head nun Sister Elena (veteran actress Lily Kedrova), both attempt to convince our group of American louts to reconsider just about everything they do. Too late for that, though: an amphibious monster from millennia past has gotten out, and immediately starts killing people—almost all of its victims are women, including Barbara (whose death scene is very Jaws, with plenty of underwater POV), and Nereus and the other bearded old men who seem to make up sixty percent of the island’s population (the rest being children and nuns) have to revive the old ways in an attempt to ward it off. Or at least that’s what they seem to be doing at first, but the way Nereus talks about it later in the movie, they were just waiting for Madeline to figure out that she’s supposed to be the virgin sacrifice.
They show the virgin sacrifice angle and the monster (although you really only see its head) fairly early in quick-cut flashbacks, and Madeline’s behaviour (staring off into the bright blue void of the Mediterranean, pouring an entire bottle of perfume on herself) also tells us pretty clearly that she’s directly connected to what’s going on, so the only real mystery throughout the movie comes from trying to piece together how these different ideas actually coalesce. It seems that the monster has some sort of long-range corrupting influence that pulled Madeline there and even drove her to convince Frye to blow up the cave wall to wake it up, but otherwise it just seems to be a monster without any real planning abilities. While most of its victims are women, what it does isn’t entirely consistent—sometimes it rips them limb from limb, sometimes it does more torturous acts of violence (as seen in the aftermath of its nun massacre, which Sister Elena somehow survives), but it’s long term goal seems to be a different kind of violence, because the final image Madeline digs up is of a naked woman being confronted by a monster who is, um, very happy to see her. This causes her to run out of the convent screaming, for good reason. The sexual component is played up later, when an entranced Madeline dives to the monster’s lair and then proceeds to writhe suggestively on a rock, with camera angles chosen for maximum effect—it’s a disturbing idea, one that certainly fits with the stories of pre-Christian mythology, but surprisingly Blood Tide doesn’t go that far into exploitation territory when given the opportunity.
That’s one of the few things that gives the monster an actual sense of being an embodiment of eternal evil rather than just a monster, because it otherwise seems like just a big dumb animal to me—I mean, it’s face is a little dopey-looking, even. A creature with a penchant for flesh-eating and dismemberment is quite concerning, sure, but an eternal evil? It’s not even entirely clear just how supernatural this thing is, especially considering that it’s not virgin sacrifice that makes it go away in the end, but plastic explosives. Having your baleful force be so mindless is a strange way to characterize the good/evil struggle, as does giving it such a mundane demise (in terms of being a non-supernatural—it does get exploded rather spectacularly), and I wonder if this is meant to undercut the whole religious angle entirely. Considering you have a scene where it attacks a holy place, at least it’s trying to explicitly show that it’s a force that Christianity has no power over, a bit like Pumpkinhead.
The portrayal of the villagers and their ways is all over the place. They’re suspicious of our protagonists, seemingly blame all of them for the events that unfold (it’s really only one or two of them), throw cats at them, and watch Barbara’s death without intervening. Soon enough, they seem to be really gearing up for the human sacrifice, and in a classical bit of child-based horror, a group of white-shirted young boys creepily try to convince a girl their age to come with them, and then when they succeed, seem to intentionally push her off a cliff into the sea—she is saved by Frye, but her mother is killed by the monster when she jumps into the water to help. Were the kids attempting to make their own sacrifice to the monster? That doesn’t really line up with what Nereus has planned, which is far less sinister: they just hold a festival with a play recreation of the old ways (the guy playing the monster has a really good costume), because he knew that it was up to Madeline to do what she was apparently supposed to do—although, in the end, it was actually Frye who sacrifices himself to solve the monster problem.
Actors likes Jones and Ferrer are here to class up the joint, with Jones especially nailing the complexities of his character, even making all the Shakespeare-quoting parts seem less ridiculous. Kove and Weller seem to be the rather typical normies who show up in these types of movies, either joking around or yelling when weird stuff happens (so, pretty normal for a vacation), and it feels like the eighties-ness of them is played up for minor-key comedy. At least that means we get a few different types of women in this movie about violence against women: a go-go eighties type (Sherry), a ditz (Barbara), and someone detached from reality (Madeline), although all three are played by gorgeous actresses who either spend time in bathing suits or get very, um, wet—just in case you thought this movie about a monster murdering people was too high-minded. Oh, I guess there’s a nun as well, so there’s a fourth type of female character.
The setting is probably a big part of the atmosphere, ably shot by director Richard Jeffries—as I said, it’s beautiful to look at, and the irony of such a brightly-lit beach locale being used in a horror movie (don’t worry, we get plenty of caves and ancient ruins to balance it out) combined with the real classical architecture gives a sense of authenticity to its plot based in ancient history. There’s plenty to see that makes the allure of such a place apparent, even if we still end up with another “those wacky foreign cultures and their mysterious ways” story. Also, it certainly gives it more atmosphere than the creepy circus music on the soundtrack, provided by Jerry Mostly and…Shuki Levy?! Get outta here Shuki, this isn’t an Ink & Pain review!
This is one of those movies that falls between the categories—Blood Tide is not quite aiming at sophistication, but it’s also not doing anything too stupid to be considered pure schlock, especially with actors that are actually putting in the effort. I’m not sure if its take on ancient evils or old religions returning in the modern day adds anything new to the discussion, but the choice of location is something I hadn’t seen before in one of these movies, and that adds some visual interest to what is ultimately a “Wicker Man meets Jaws” elevator pitch. Now that I think about it, that is a pretty good elevator pitch.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 