Director/Screenplay/Producer – Scott Walker, Photography – Aaron Morton, Music – Max Aruj, Visual Effects Supervisor – Brenton Cumberpatch, Special Effects Supervisor – Brendon Durey, Creature Created by Weta Workshop (Creative Lead – Richard Taylor), Production Design – Nicholas Williams. Production Company – Ingenious Media/Happy Dog Entertainment/GFC Films/Well Go USA Entertainment/Cornerstone Films/AM Media/Images&Sound.
Cast
Luciana Buchanan (Jules Adams), Matthew Whelan (Ben Adams), Zara Nausbaum (Reia Adams), Holly Shervey (Linda Adams), Ascia Maybury (Merial Tingey), Regina Hegemann (Creature), Mark Mitchinson (Amos Tilbury), Jack Barry (Alec Adams)
Plot
Oakland, California, 1978. Ben Adams learns that he has inherited a property at Hobbit’s Bay on the Oregon Coast in his mother’s will. Ben, his wife Jules and their daughter Reia travel up to the old, abandoned house and move in. However, as Ben ventures down into the water tank on the property to get their water running, he disturbs an amphibian creature that lurks in the darkness.
New Zealand director Scott Walker made his directorial debut with The Frozen Ground (2013), which I thought was quite a reasonable true crime film. I looked around for what else Walker had done but it appeared at the time that he had completely vanished from screens. However, a decade after his previous film, Walker reappeared, having returned to New Zealand to make The Tank.
Part of the disappointment of The Tank is that it is Scott Walker returning to New Zealand to shoot but almost immediately is pretending that the entire film is set in the USA. He has a cast of New Zealand actors all affecting American accents. The filming location is Bethell’s Beach, a popular location made famous through various episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1994-9) and Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001), which the film rather ridiculously tries to pass off as being the Oregon coast. Has the massive tourist industry that New Zealand experienced as a result of Hercules, Xena and in particular The Lord of the Rings taught people nothing – that New Zealand as a filming location is a massively popular tourist destination? It seems a backward step to the 1980s/90s where the country needed to disguise itself as being America just so a film could be sold into the US mainstream.
My immediate thoughts as The Tank started was that we were in for a Haunted House film. It seems to go through all the tropes of the genre with shadowy things moving around the house, unexpected noises, the characters uncovering a diary that recounts/gives flashbacks to horrible events in the past. However, what transpires is something more corporeal than that where it is revealed that what we are watching is in fact a Monster Movie.
The monster in the tank
This is about the point that I started to become majorly disappointed with The Tank. For one, the script casts Luciana Buchanan as someone with an expertise in animal biology but makes no use of this. In fact, it does absolutely nothing to explain what the creature is other than identify it as an amphibian. And in fact, the monster we get is a completely generic movie monster. The Weta Workshop come up with a mildly different design of the creature walking with four splayed legs, but in all other respects this is a standard monster by way of Alien (1979) and H.R. Giger, dozens of copies which we have had on screens since the 1980s. There are a couple of scenes with it killing people, but Scott Walker does little to generate any real suspense. And that is about all there is to the film.
The Tank is not related to and should be confused with The Tank (2017), a film about people cooped in a NASA isolation habitat.
