Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Claw (1944, USA)

 

(Spoilers.) In general, this installment of the classic Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes & Dr Watson series, The Scarlet Claw, is commonly cited as one of the best of the series, if not the best. And, indeed, the programmer truly does live up to its reputation — with the caveat, of course, that you are one of the continually dwindling population that have a penchant (and the patience) for old movies of the prior century.

If so, well, of the eleven Sherlock Holmes films director Roy William Neill (4 Sep 1887 — 14 Dec 1946) made, this one, the sixth of the Holmes & Watson films made at Universal, is definitely the most atmospheric, coming across at times more like a classic Universal Horror film than simply another entry in a popular, low-budget detective programmer. But while The Scarlet Claw has all the trappings of an old monster-on-the-loose film, in the end the murderer proves to be something more human and mundane than, say, a mad ghoul or man-killing gorilla or reanimated monster or swamp creature...

Trailer to

Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Claw:

Much of the movie's success must go to the cinematographer George Robinson (2 Apr 1890 – 30 Aug 1958), who shot a total of seven films for Neill, including Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943 / trailer), but The Scarlet Claw is their only joint Holmes & Watson project. Like most people involved in the detective series, Robinson was a true B-film factory worker with streamline experience, and he ultimately worked on more than 150 movies, mostly at Universal. Well-practiced knack aside, it is probably due to the sheer number of his projects that there is more than one horror classic or semi-classic to be found in his oeuvre, including the Spanish version of Dracula (1931 / scene), the latently lesbian Dracula's Daughter (1936 / trailer) and the unjustly underappreciated Son of Frankenstein (1939 / trailer) — not to mention, much later in his career, the forever entertaining Tarantula (1955 / trailer). Robinson handles the film's deep focuses, odd angles and long tracking shots with a finesse that can only be put to experience; combined with Neill's assured direction, the result is a pleasure to watch. 

Likewise, it is always a pleasure to see Nigel Bruce's Dr. Watson as something more than just a simple doofus — true, he is still a bit verbose, pompous, clumsy and laughable, but he is at least likable and is given enough to do for one to understand why Holmes bothers to have him around — much in contrast to his part in the following year's The Woman In Green (1945), in which he comes across simply as an incompetent buffoon.

The Scarlet Claw is not officially credited as an adaptation of any of author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original short stories or books, but mildly attentive viewers will probably note that the two industry stalwarts that came up with the story, Paul Gangelin (7 Nov 1898 – 25 Sept 1961) and Brenda Weisberg (6 Apr 1899 – 1 May 1996), owe many aspects of their tale to Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles.* (A case that Watson directly refers to early in the movie.) Director Neill and Edmund L. Hartmann** (23 Sept 1911 – 28 Nov 2003), who a few years earlier helped write the lesser Holmes entry The Secret Weapon (1942), translated the narrative into the working script.

* The only other known combined project of the two, done the previous year, in 1943, is the oddly overlooked and immensely watchable early proto-zombie movie, The Mad Ghoul [trailer]. Gangelin, who also helped scribe the classic They Drive by Night (1938 / trailer) as well as the anti-classic The Giant Claw (1957), stayed in the scriptwriting biz till his death, but Weisberg, whose credits include Weird Woman (1944 / trailer) and The Mummy's Ghost (1944 / trailer), retired — like so many women — when she got married, leaving Hollyweird for Phoenix and her husband Morris Meckler.

** As we mentioned in our review of The Secret Weapon, "Hartmann possibly achieved greatest respectability (and the most money) as the producer of TV shows — My Three Sons (1962-72), anyone? — but we here at a wasted life respect him for his work on Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1943 / trailer, with Turhan Bey), Black Friday (1940 / trailer) and William Beaudine's The Face of Marble (1946 / full film)."

The Scarlet Claw places the British odd couple in Canada, where they are taking part in an occult congress when the lead speaker, Lord William Penrose (Paul Cavanagh [8 Dec 1888 – 15 Mar 1964], of too many other fun films to mention, in the first of the three Holmes films he made with Neill) is called back to his remote marshland manor* due to the death of his wife, Lady Lillian Gentry Penrose (an uncredited Gertrude Astor [9 Nov 1887 – 9 Nov 1977]), who has been found in the local church with her throat ripped open. Penrose insists that her death is due to the supernatural creature* believed to be running wild in the moors around the bleak and forlorn village where he lives. Suspiciously enough, he refuses to cooperate with the disbelieving Holmes, who decides to investigate despite the Lord's disapproval. It doesn't take long for Holmes to find a connection between the dead Lady Penrose, the local Innkeeper Jounet (Arthur Hohl [21 Max 1889 – 10 Mar 1964] of The Island of Lost Souls [1932] and The Devil Doll [1936 / trailer]) and the town's crippled recluse, Judge Brisson (Miles Mander [14 May 1888 – 8 Feb 1946]**). It seems that all three had sometime in the past crossed paths with a psychopathic actor (Gerald Hamer [16 Nov 1886 – 6 Jul 1972], in the third of the five Holmes films he was to work in for Neill) who had escaped from jail* and disappeared some time before. Obviously out to kill all those he hated, the big question faced by Holmes is who amongst the inhabitants of the village is the murdering actor?* Indeed, a master of disguise, he turns out to be more than just one person...

* Some of the shades of The Hound of the Baskervilles...

** Miles Mander is an interesting figure: a scion of the Mander Family, the now-unsung Hollywood character actor was a pioneer aviator, an avid ballooner, captain in the military during WWI, a sheep farmer in New Zealand and more — all prior to becoming an occasional director and avid actor, first in England and then in the USA. He also wrote plays and novels, and was at one point married to an Indian princess, Prativa Sundari Devi Narayan (22 Nov 1891 – 23 Jul 1923). He appeared in over 100 films prior to his death, including numerous classics, such as Murder, My Sweet (1944 / trailer), To Be or Not To Be (1942 / trailer), Wuthering Heights (1939 / trailer), Five Graves In Cairo (1943 / trailer) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945 / trailer). Amidst his rather long list of other intriguing projects is the early and now lost (check your attic) non-Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes and the Missing Rembrandt (1932), the second of five oddly overlooked Sherlock Holmes movies starring Arthur Wontner (21 Jan 1875 – 10 Jul 1960) as Sherlock Holmes, the others being: Murder at the Baskervilles / Silver Blaze (1937), The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935), The Sign of the Four: Sherlock Holmes' Greatest Case (1932) and Sherlock Holmes' Fatal Hour / The Sleeping Cardinal (1931).

 

All in all, Holmes does do a bit more actual detecting in The Scarlet Claw than he does in many of the other films, but, as normal, the bad guy slips through his fingers more than once. And while the murder of Marie (Kay Harding*), the young and pathetic daughter of the innkeeper, serves to underscore just how nasty the bad guy is, one cannot help but feel that Holmes failed to take some obvious precautionary steps that anyone with a brain would have taken that would've (probably) prevented the murder. Those minor gripes aside, The Scarlet Claw is nonetheless a tight, well-paced, occasionally almost scary and always entertaining movie. Not only that, but at the end of The Scarlet Claw, the murderer's final identity is an actual surprise, even if the actual identity of the man he is following isn't (a reveal that also mimics that found in The Hound of the Baskervilles).

* Despite the relatively prominent placement of her name on some of the movie's posters, Kay Harding, born and also credited once under the name Jackie Lou Harding (5 Jan 1924 – 15 Mar 1984), had but a short career of barely more than a year. It began as an uncredited receptionist in the truly excellent Phantom Lady (1944), peeked with this movie and The Mummy's Curse (1944 / trailer), and ended as the (uncredited) fourth victim in Sherlock Holmes & the Woman in Green (1945 / trailer). She left the biz for a happy marriage and motherhood, never to divorce her husband Lloyd Patterson. Per Scott Wilson's Resting Places, she died during renal-cancer surgery in Santa Clara, CA., and her cremated remains were scattered by the family.

The full film —

Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Claw:

Silent Venom (USA, 2009)

Let's hear it for the not-very-famous wrestler Fabulous Freddie Valentine, a man who follows his dreams. Including that of being a filmmaker, which is one of the many things he does under his slightly more familiar name by birth, Fred Olan Ray.

Sure, most of his low to Z-budget movies are not very good — see: Biohazard (1985), Venomous (2001), et alia — but give the man credit: he may be doing what he loves badly (well, "badly" most of the time), but he is doing it and living from it. Remember that the next time you're slinging burgers at McDs or preparing to earn your rent money by wiping the smegma off your john's Oscar Meyer as your own dreams slip further and further away...

We don't know who had the original idea for the movie, director Fabulous Freddie Valentine or regular TV-movie scribe Mark "Amazing Onionhead" Sanderson, but the inspiration is obvious: here, instead of Snakes on a Plane (2006) with a slumming name star having fun, we have snakes on a submarine, with no-name actors and slumming lower-echelon stars desperate to pay their rent.

German trailer to
Silent Venom:

But if Snakes on a Plane fully embraces its low-culture, grindhouse roots (who can possibly forget the well-aimed snake bite to the blonde's naked nipple?) to become dumb exploitation fun, Silent Venom prefers an attempt at low-budget TV-level seriousness and wallows within a sphere that could be described as "family appropriate". (Indeed, despite the singular female character's mania to have a shower on the sub, we never even get a discreet skin scene.*) Much like the older, campier, faster, more violent and far-better science-fiction movie Space Marines (1996), Silent Venom comes across as a kiddie film without kids in the cast. Thus, how much you will enjoy this movie depends on how much you like commonplace TV movies and movies aimed at family audiences.

* Krista Allen, who plays the singular female character, has taken nude showers in other film projects — like in the super cheesy horror movie Haunted Sea (1997 / trailer). That film is a sleazier reinterpretation of Roger Corman's horror comedy Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961 / trailer / full film).

Considering this D2V movie's TV-movie and family-audience vibe, it is easy to understand why some claims have been made that Silent Venom is an oblique remake of an obscure CBS movie of the week, the long-forgotten Fer-de-Lance (1974 / full movie), starring David Janssen ([27 Mar 1931 – 13 Feb 1980] of Cult of the Cobra [1955 / trailer], The Swiss Conspiracy [1976] and Moon of the Wolf [1972]). That said, while the somewhat dull and not too fun Fer-de-Lance and the somewhat dull but occasionally fun Silent Venom do share some basic plot similarities (specifically: snakes on a submarine), we see Silent Venom as influenced less by that slab of CBS flotsam than an older, better-known TV series: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-68). The underplayed-but-present concept of oversized "mutant snakes" fits well into that series general science-fiction orientation — monsters on the sub were not unheard of in that series — and one could easily imagine the manly main trio of the sub, Commander James O'Neill (Luke Perry [11 Oct 1966 – 4 Mar 2019] of American Strays [1996], below from his turn as a disgraced homophobic preacher in the TV series Oz [1997-2003]) & Lt Commander Houston Davies (John L. Curtis) & Eddie Boudreau (Anthony Tyler Quinn), along with some recognizable-name special guest star, having a new low-budget adventure every week. The only thing in Silent Venom that ultimately undermines that concept is that the movie ends with Luke Perry's character's retirement.

Silent Venom opens on a Pacific island that looks a lot like California scrublands, where we meet the movie's asshole-you-want-to-die, Jake Goldin (Louis Mandylor of The Prometheus Project [2010]), get to watch two non-characters die — one by snakebite, the other by being eaten by a huge, mutated snake in a scene as laughable as anything found in The Snake King (2005) — and meet Jake the Assistant's hot herpetologist boss, Dr. Andrea Swanson (Krista "Can't Act MILF" Allen of Feast [2005 / trailer]), who wears tight string tops and is conducting nefarious military experiments and mutations on poisonous snakes. Then, on a generic military-office set, we meet Commander James O'Neill (Perry), whose moment of integrity has cost him his career, being given a chance to save his retirement by Admiral Bradley Wallace (Tom "I Take Every Job I Do Seriously" Berenger) by delivering a decommissioned, and thus unarmed, submarine to somewhere in Asia.

And so it comes to pass that when Dr. Swanson and Jake have to evacuate the island due to incoming Chinese, O'Neill's sub is the only possible option. Being the capitalistic, egocentric scumbag that he is, Jake smuggles some two dozen deadly snakes (including two giant mutant ones) aboard. Of course, as soon as the sub starts playing cat and mouse with a Chinese war fleet, they promptly escape and start killing sailors.

Okay, Krista Allen is seriously miscast as the herpetologist, but her character is relatively unimportant to the movie; that they even cast such a hot actress in the role is only to add some sexual tension between the tightlipped and sleepwalking Luke Perry, something that only truly ignites during an oddly funny scene in which Commander O'Neill slowly unwraps deadly snakes off Dr. Swanson (only to toss them carelessly aside): director Fabulous Freddie Valentine films the scene as if it were an act of teasing foreplay — not that the tease ever pays off.

Jake Goldin, on the other hand, is truly well cast and successfully channels the irritating immaturity of his annoying younger-brother shtick of My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002 / trailer) and its sequels, like the last, My Big Fat Greek Wedding III (2023 / trailer), whence the image below comes, to be the guy you're truly happy to see die; Goldin is so naturally unlikable (but for one inexplicable scene in which he takes umbrage at the sexism of young — and soon dead — sailor Rhodes [Haran Jackson]) that you could almost believe that he must be like that in real life. (But then, who knows, maybe he is.)

Berenger, in the stock part of the good man back at the base, is on screen more than one might expect for what was surely a one-day job, but as always he doesn't let on in any way that he knows he's in a crappy movie. (Rather unlike Perry, whose dry, tired characterization of Commander O'Neill often comes across as the result of a subliminal desire to be anywhere but in the movie.)

Silent Venom is more than slightly padded in more ways than one. Not only do most scenes drag out in TV-movie fashion and the two-part credit sequence way too long, there is an overdose of stock-footage submarine shots. And the whole cat-and-mouse subplot of the sub trying to avoid being detected by the evil Chinese seems less relevant than casual padding of a narrative that really had nowhere else to go once the snakes get released.

Likewise, considering how much easily damaged technical equipment is found on a sub, a lot of guns are shot rather pointlessly at snakes, most of which — all but the two big mutant ones — are not exactly a big target. Still, it's fun watch the snakes disappear and reappear: much like how all the bite victims (but for the galley cook) seem to get beamed into the sickbay, the timing of the snakes' appearances is immensely inconsistent — for example, the snake canister is barely opened and one is seen slithering on Jake's bag and under Dr. Swanson's towel — and they almost seem to appear and disappear at will, like when they basically are just suddenly there between Boudreau and Dr. Swanson when the two are running down the subway corridor.

In short, Silent Venom is as flawed as any other Fabulous Freddie Valentine movie but slightly more enjoyable than many, providing you can harness your inner-child and enjoy it for what it is in its core: a family-appropriate TV movie.

The really young ones and people suffering ophidiophobia might find the flick terrifying, especially since it obviously uses a lot of real snakes (all but the mutated ones), but everyone else will see the movie as harmless fluff that offers nothing new and no surprises. No way necessary viewing, Silent Venom passes the test of possible TV viewing when stuck with the kids or with nothing else is at hand. But don't bother searching this one out, because it sure ain't that good.

Ninja Hunt (Hong Kong, 1986)

We've had the accidental (dis)pleasure of watching a Joseph Lai/Godrey Ho production before, the last time being back in 2022, when we suffered our way through Golden Destroyers, a cinematic fiasco made a year earlier than this cinematic abortion here. Even if it probably is not, Golden Destroyers at least has the appearance of being a stand-alone, "real" project, unlike this mess, which is obviously edited-together footage — it even includes an exchange (a "face-to-face" conversation) between two characters in which one is outside in a park and the other is inside a room — and is less a movie than, possibly, a failed CIA-financed ploy to stupefy the VHS-viewing population of the world (it seems doubtful that Ninja Hunt ever made to any cinema anywhere).

Trailer to

Ninja Hunt:

It our review of Golden Destroyers, we scribbled in furor that the movie is "an absolutely appalling film about which one should probably not write, for any description of the idiocies and awfulness that permeate every aspect of this patchwork movie cannot help but make the movie sound more entertaining than it is. Sometimes bad films are simply bad, and Golden Destroyers is an exemplary film in this regard." A statement that is easily 100% applicable to Ninja Hunt. But then, from what we have picked up along the way, it would seem that few if any Joseph Lai and/or/cum Godfrey Ho "movies" are truly worth watching as a "movie".

On the other hand, as an experience of unintentional surrealism, an experience of a total lack of cinematic talent, or anything remotely indicating a respect for the media or genre, or even an interest in attempting to create anything but the cheapest of disposable product, Ninja Hunt, like many a demented Lai/Ho pieced-together project, is a one-of-a-kind of experience that, despite the unintentional but hearty laughter it sometimes induces, verges on visual and mental torture. It is one of those movies that makes you feel truly guilty, that really gives you the depressing feeling that you are indeed wasting your life, and that if you watch crap like this it should be you who has terminal cancer instead of [put in name of your afflicted friend or family member here]. And as we all know, life is way too long.

Like too many ninja movies back in the day they were popular, Ninja Hunt is populated only by Caucasian ninjas, none of whom appear to be particularly graceful or talented in the martial arts. Likewise, the dull narrative, as to be expected from a movie less scripted than edited, offers 90 minutes of insensibility in which diverse characters separate and converge and disappear, and diverse narrative tangents are picked up and dropped or simply change, with everything continually punctuated by nonsensical fight scenes or scenes of bad dancing or women playing rock-paper-scissors in a room decorated with Playboy centerfolds.

Nothing occurs in Ninja Hunt that might enliven the "narrative" events, but often things transpire that unintentionally engender great mirth. This is in particularly true about the ninja fight scenes, with their endless slow-motion cartwheels done by men wearing fashion-faux-pas polyester ninja suits that hide their faces so that stunt men can do the cheesy gymnastics and jump about like gravity-defying spastics. As to be expected, the two big final showdowns — to tie the main two diffuse storylines together, separate showdowns occur at the same time between normalos and between Good Ninja Dickson and Bad Ninja — like any and all fights scenes before, are neither thrilling or interesting, nor well choreographed or shot.

In regard to what Ninja Hunt is ostensibly about, the disparate events and characters concern ever so faintly (as in: with the tangibility of a fart) a non-sensible plotline about a VHS containing the recipe for a special drug, DAK10, which turns those who take it into crazed killing machines. (Interestingly enough, throughout the entire movie, the drug is never actually produced or taken by anyone.) Stolen by black-clad Ninjas led by a leader dressed in a hilarious bright yellow outfit with Joan-Crawford shoulders (played by "Sruart Smith", the plan is to sell the recipe-containing VHS to the some gangsters that like to play rock-paper-scissors and do petty crimes. The CIA, in any event, sends in Ninja Dickson (a wooden and disinterested Richard Harrison) to get the VHS at all costs...

The relationship and gangster drama concerning the taxi driver Aaron (supposedly working undercover for Ninja Dickson) and street kid Billy and bordello mother Rachel (Ninja Dickson's ex, now screwing the gangster boss Campbell) and gangsters appears to be taken from an even more-obscure 1983 Taiwanese movie Cuowu de jiaobu sheng a.k.a. The Wrong Steps. The rest, meaning the stuff featuring Ninja Dickson (when not played by a disguised double), in an interview, Richard Harrison, who was known to choose his projects based on what new country the project would take him — even if it meant working for someone like Joe D'Amato, the director of Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980), amongst other trash, as the porno poster below reveals — when talking about his working with Ho and Lai, indirectly reveals why he looks so disinterested, if not annoyed: "I went to Hong Kong to work for them, and even though the quality of the [two] films were very poor my wife and I enjoyed Hong Kong very much, and the crew was mostly made of nice people. [...] Mr. Lai contacted a friend who was a tax man and was told I owed quite a bit of money in taxes. When I showed that my contract stated I would not be responsible for any taxes in Hong Kong, the man said it was not valid. I agreed then to do another film for Mr. Lai to pay the taxes. There was no script, only sides. Nothing made any sense [...]. Also, during this last film or films, our living conditions were not good. My first call came from Germany, telling me how bad the films were and they had only bought them because they trusted me. I have no idea how many films they made from my last filming, but some say as many as ten.* I put a lot of trust in friendship, so it hurt more than just professionally."

* Some sources say "at least twenty-four different [ninja] movies"...

Ninja Hunt is less a movie than it is a waste of celluloid, and it no way merit anyone's time, not even that of the most brain-dead ninja-movie completionist. At best, it is a 90-minute visual vomitorium produced by "filmmakers" who, like Donald Trump and the contemporary Republican party, wholeheartedly believe that P.T. Barnum was right when he said "There's a sucker born every minute," and who want to milk those suckers for as much as they can.

Don't be a sucker, watch some other Richard Harrison* movie instead...

* For those of you unfamiliar with Richard Harrison: "Born in May 1935 in Salt Lake City, Utah, actor and model Richard Harrison enjoyed a long career in films until his retirement in the 1990s. Much like his contemporary Ed Fury, Harrison started his career as a physique model in the 1950s and graced the covers of numerous magazines. The extremely handsome Harrison made his film debut in the campy science fiction effort Kronos (1957 / trailer). [...] While he was getting steady film work, Harrison's career wasn't in the fast lane. So, in 1961 he headed to Rome and became a star in a string of sword and sandal films. [...] Harrison ran with the sword and sandal genre until it died out in the mid 1960s. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he easily made the transition to other film genres, including spy films and spaghetti westerns. [drkrm gallery]" A cult name among bad-film aficionados, not to mention fans of vintage beefcake (though, unluckily, unlike Ed Fury he does not seem to have ever shown the full monty), the average Richard Harrison genre movie will entertain you, particularly his earlier stuff — but in between, be prepared for stupefying crap like Ninja Hunt. 

Richard Harrison's days doing

spaghetti westerns:

Zombie Tidal Wave (USA, 2019)

Considering the amount of quirky laughs found in Anthony C. Ferrante's feature film directorial debut, the flawed but at times somewhat scary ghost story Boo/Scream and Run (2005), it really is not all that difficult to comprehend his evolution into a contemporary auteur of intentionally "bad" but entertaining TV "horror" comedies like those of his Sharknado series (Sharknado [2013 / trailer], Sharknado 2: The Second One [2014 / trailer], Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! [2015 / trailer], Sharknado 4: The 4th Awakens [2016 / trailer], Sharknado 5: Global Swarming [2017 / trailer] and The Last Sharknado: It's About Time [2018 / trailer]).

With that mostly entertaining and harebrained franchise pretty much flogged deader than the bleached bones of a decade-dead horse by the time it ended, for his first follow-up genre film, Ferrante turned his attention away from what might be today's second most popular horror "monster" (killer sharks) to today's most popular genre monster: MAGA Republicans the flesh-eating zombie. But as perhaps to be expected, he decided to once again lean towards the cheesy and ridiculous — like, for real: who can take a title like Zombie Tidal Wave seriously? Unexpectedly enough, however, despite the cheesy title and the more than occasional intentional laugh the movie induces, Ferrante's movie is also often played more straight than deadpan. 

Trailer to

Zombie Tidal Wave:

Considering that Zombie Tidal Wave is set amidst the coastal beauty of Krabi, Thailand, it is almost a bit surprising that Ferrante didn't manage to get a bigger name star* to join the project than his regular, somewhat thespian-challenged but pleasantly DILFy lead actor Ian Ziering (of all the Sharknado flicks & other fine stuff like Tyrannosaurus Azteca [2007 / full movie]), the former husband of Playboy Playmate (Sept 1997) Nikki "Generic Blonde" Ziering (seen below).

But as Ferrante films are not meant to be Academy contenders, Ziering's thespian skills are more than good enough for his character Hunter Shaw, a manly boatsman ready to leave paradise in manly pursuit of maintaining his manly freedom. (He, of course, goes through enough character development over the course of the film to realize, at the end, that love and family is worth more than manly freedom.) Ziering, in any event, is never overshadowed or upstaged by any of his co-stars, all of whom treat the filmic material with aplomb equal to his. 

* See, for example, the paid-vacation films Croc (2007) and/or Amphibious 3D (2010). But in all likelihood, within the US of Abnormality itself, and unlike in Old Europe, Ziering is probably a "bigger" name than either Michael Madsen or Michael Paré.

The a.k.a title Zombie Tsunami might be a better title, alliteration-wise, but Zombie Tidal Wave could well be a small nod to a much earlier cult film that also features undead rising from tropic waters, namely Shock Waves (1977). Director Ferrante, who has among his earliest film credits a brief appearance in the less-than-laudable zombie movie The Dead Hate the Living! (2000), fills ZTW with an occasional nod to that and other "classics" of the genre (a music group appears named The Fulcis, after the director of Zombie [1979], for example, and elsewhere there is a boat propeller scene that easily trumps the scene it refers to in Zombie Holocaust a.k.a. Dr Butcher MD [1980]) that it is almost a surprise that he didn't manage to have a character say something along the lines of "They're coming to get you, [Name of Choice]."

But for whatever allusions might be found in ZTW to earlier movies, and despite the movie's ridiculous title and basic premise, the flashes of camp and the occasional off-the-wall idea or ironic scene, as already mentioned, much of the movie plays out pretty much like a serious zombie flick. The result is a slightly schizophrenic zombie movie that is in no way a highpoint of the genre but that will more than satisfy the average zombie-flick fan, particularly since ZTW is surprisingly gory for a contemporary genre film, television or not. (That said, ZTW is surprisingly gory primarily when the scene involves the blue-skinned and blue-blooded zombies and not the red-blooded, turned-by-bite zombies; particularly the latter rely on bad CGI.)

A tight film that doesn't waste much time on anything extraneous, once the paradisaical setting is set an earthquake promptly rips a crack in the ocean's floor, releasing the first of the long-submerged, blue-skinned zombies. While in Shock Waves, the select zombies from the sunken ship inhabiting the waters were the product of NS experimentation in producing perfect soldiers, the untold numbers* released from the sunken ship in ZTW are the product of Big Pharma experimentation in creating... something. They breaststroke into the coastal town of Emrys Bay, and before you know what has happened, everyone but the film's steadily shrinking core group of survivors seems to have turned. The little plot the film has concerns how the groups or individuals separate and re-gather, survive or die, and, ultimately, put an end to the zombie outbreak of zombies that are unable to decide whether they should shamble or run but want flesh more than brains.**

* Throughout the film and in any given scene, the numbers of the blue and/or bitten dead change indiscriminately. The tidal waves, for examples, are dotted with thousands of swimming dead, but the numbers on shore hardly reach the hundreds. And later, during the wood-chipper scene, the huge mass that breaks through the gates is inexplicably reduced to less than a half dozen that easily get tossed in the machine. 

** Ever notice, though, how zombies seldom ever actually finish a single meal in any zombie film? Here, too, they tend to eat a bite or two before pursuing their next mouthful of fresh meat. 

On the whole, ZTW offers few surprises but some good fun one-liners, a lot of mostly poor CGI effects and some decent practical ones, and some dumb and fun ideas. (Ever see a drummer fighting off zombies with drumsticks? He doesn't do it for long.) The mandatory opening scene revealing that zombies are out and about and underwater, featuring a marriage proposal never completed, is cookie-cut but handled better than, say, the virtually identical but zombieless scene in Amphibious 3-D. The big surprise of the flick is the first of the "good guys" that gets bitten and subsequently becomes one mean, near unstoppable zombie... those who subsequently do or don't die and turn is less surprising. The dick of the film, a self-righteous rich guy named Blaine (Lincoln Bevers), offers one of the best scenes by proving that his future bride Connie (Natasha Hardegen of Appetite for Sin [2022 / trailer] and The Envy of Everyone [2022/ trailer]) is replaceable.

Zombie Tidal Wave: a fun one for non-demanding zombie fans and those who like contemporary intentionally "bad" film. Two partially eaten thumbs up!