It’s not uncommon for low budget horror movies to become incredibly successful, or at least attain a cult following of some kind, not every low budget horror movie will be groundbreaking or regarded as one of the greatest. However, independent low budget movies like The Tank are the ones that I want to see, want to be good, because great film makers start on these smaller films.
Written and directed by Scott Walker, The Tank is a familiar story about a financially struggling family that gets a ‘big break’ when they inherit a property, previously unbeknownst to our characters. The inheritor is the patriarch of the films family, Ben (Matthew Whelan) who in agreement with his wife, Jules (Luciane Buchana) take their daughter Reia (Zara Nausbaum) to see his new inheritance. I can’t forget Archie the Dog because I can say with all sincerity, he was the one of the only characters whose name I could remember during the film. The inheritance itself is a costal property from Ben’s mother who passed away 6 months ago. The characters question the delay and the lawyer blames it on poor filling, to which our characters move on unbothered and believing that this happens a lot.
When Archie the Dog and his family arrive at their newly inherited home, the house is in a complete shambles but on the outside only with the interior being remarkably okay. If the house is safe and liveable, then our protagonists can stay there and fight the evil beasties. One of the perks of their new home is a beautiful beach with a private cove, surrounding forest and the titular tank. No, not an army tank, a water tank, that’s broken. So, Ben decides to fix it, meaning he goes down into a water tank that hasn’t been cleaned or opened in at least 40 years.
I was surprised that this was the catalyst for the film, given the amount of time spent on flashbacks about Ben’s mum and her time in the house. Honestly, the use of these flashbacks was just a waste of time. The payoff for these flashbacks is a blink and you miss it scene, and because the climax for the film was so rushed, I felt even more frustrated because this could have been an interesting story arch had it been explored in more than a couple of filtered flashback sequences.
Once the monster was released, yes, this is a monster movie, I could give the movie some positives. If you want the best of the best for creature creation it must be WETA Studios who are behind the beastie here. It looks convincingly slimy and disgusting with a little Xenomorph mixed in. I should also praise the actors as despite the awful script, their performances are strong. Although, because the characters had been written so poorly, I didn’t care about them, but the actors tried really hard.
As a whole, The Tank was miserable. The script was not only poorly written and clunky, but painfully dull. So dull that it was hard to focus, my brain was crying out to be entertained! It’s a shame that the best part of the film was almost impossible to see, unless you had your screen brightness all the way up because the film is just far too dark. I wish this had have been funny bad so that I could recommend this film to people with trepidation. But as it is, I can’t. There’s not enough positive to outweigh the just how dull it is.