Dan Slevin reviews a Kiwi-made horror film about a young family who inherits an old house only to discover it's already occupied... by an amphibious creature who doesn't take kindly to their arrival.
In The Tank, Matt Whelan and Luciane Buchanan play a couple struggling to make a go of their popular California pet store.
He's in grad school and refurbishing their apartment in his spare time. She runs the business and appears to be the brains of the outfit when to comes to the animals.
A lawyer with an unfeasible moustache turns up unexpectedly. Evidently, when Whelan's mother died in a mental hospital she didn't know - or didn't want anyone else to know - that she owned a run down cottage on a picturesque stretch of Oregon coastline.
This could be the answer to their prayers. A home for their family - including daughter Reia (Zara Nausbaum) in an idyllic bit of the old 'nature' or an instant capital gain.
The film is set in 1978 and it has to be because we need the family to be cut off from the outside world - no mobile phones, no internet and - in this case, no power or running water.
They are off the grid and the fresh water for the house is supposed to be stored in a large underground tank - so large it reaches under the house and is actually fed, not by rainwater from the roof of those house, but from a local bore.
When Whelan climbs down to open the valve, sure enough, fresh water starts pouring into the tank but only brown - and then thick black - liquid emerges from the taps in the house.
He's also managed to wake up some of the local wildlife - wildlife that doesn't take kindly to humans on their territory and wildlife who may have had something to do with the disappearance of Whelan's character's father and his mother's mental breakdown 40 years before.
Foreshadowing and then exposition arrive at just the right moments in The Tank - in fact fairly continuously - and we are lucky that Whelan and Buchanan are such an appealing couple because they are pretty much all we've got for the first hour or so.
Great monster movies know to hold the big reveal back until the right moment but The Tank doesn't do quite enough to get us juiced and ready. The sound design by Nick Buckton does most of the heavy lifting in advance but I think we could have done with a few more hints to prepare for what's to come.
And when it does arrive, I'm grateful that writer/director Scott Walker insisted on practical monster effects - an actor in a silicon suit more or less - because we see that so infrequently these days and, also, you can see that Wētā Workshop got really excited about building their own Creature from the Black Lagoon for a change instead of the robots and armour that takes up so much of their time.
For a film essentially thrown together quickly once the borders closed after the first lockdown, The Tank is pretty effective. New Zealand's film craftspeople are incredibly skilled and resourceful. Our actors - Whelan and Buchanan especially - can hold their own with anyone comparable overseas.
And Walker's direction is capable and well supported by editors Martin Brinkler and John Gilbert.
Where it does show its weakness is in Walker's script which is competent to a fault. What I mean to say is, it does all the things a feature script should do, but isn't quite clever enough to hide the workings. It feels like a few more drafts might have added some extra layers - more subtle motivations for Whelan's character perhaps, or some extra peril from the monsters.
A little less family history, a bit more "what's going on in the forest".
I'm not even sure they've left much of an opportunity there for a sequel.
The Tank is effective enough and super-easy to describe in the thirty or so words you get as people scroll past your title on streaming services. That's where The Tank will have a long life and I have no problem with that at all.
The Tank is rated R13 for bloody violence and horror, and it is playing in select cinemas across the country now.
