Blood Tide (Film Review)

1982 21st Century Film Corporation
Directed by: Richard Jefferies; Written by: Richard Jefferies and Nico Mastorakis
Starring: James Earl Jones, José Ferrer, Lila Kedrova, Mary Louise Weller, Martin Kove, Lydia Cornell, and Deborah Shelton
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 87 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 4/10

Neil Grice, along with his wife, Sherry, have tracked Neil's missing sister, Madeline, to a remote island off the coast of Greece. Neil, who's well-off and has a mighty fine boat, is relieved to find that his artist sister is doing just fine, restoring some ancient works on the island, while spending time with tinkering treasure-hunter, Frye, and Frye's girlfriend, Barbara. The search mission turns into one nice, scantily-clad vacation, until a drunken Frye unseals a mysterious door in an underwater cave, Madeline starts going into trances, and a local girl gets eaten by a monster. Somehow, none of these are the worst thing happening. It seems this incident has awoken an ancient religion on the island, one that sacrifices virgins to the monster...virgins like Madeline.
1982's Blood Tide is one aesthetically pleasing film. Seaside Greece looks like a clear-watered, rocky outcrop dream, but that's not the only scenery. For the ladies, there's prime Martin Kove as Neil, rarely wearing a shirt, often wearing a speedo. There's also a rare-form, silver fox James Earl Jones as Frye, who doesn't like wearing a shirt either, unless it's a wetsuit. At one point, Frye scolds his girlfriend for handing him a knife to cut a melon, then rips it apart with his bare hands, juices flowing everywhere before he shoves his face into it. For the guys, there's a made in a lab and poured into a bikini Mary Louise Weller, an "I hate the bottom of shirts AND shorts, but I DO love beach aerobics," Lydia Cornell, and there's a straight from another planet, so that must be why she's only wearing a thin white frock and continuously going into the water, Deborah Shelton, who not only won Miss USA, Miss Universe runner-up, and Playboy Playmate of the Month, March 1974, but whose green eyes are so enormous and hypnotic, I nearly thought for a few moments that I was watching a good movie.

 

Deborah, he can't help that he's from EARTH!!!

Alas, I was not. Deborah Shelton may be so beautiful that thousands of viewers wrote in to the TV show Dallas after her departure just because they couldn't stand the thought of not looking at her every week (and Dallas brought her back!), but her strange, moonily seductive performance can't save 1982's Blood Tide from being a stinker, even it it's a fairly entertaining one. Somehow, this film stars not one, but TWO Oscar winners, James Earl Jones and José Ferrer (the former won an EGOT!), and they're both goofing about in a film about a bad rubber suit monster who demands sex with a remote island's virgins, lest he kill them all. 

Even as I couldn't stop watching, I wondered which part of the film works better. The first hour is a beach hangout movie that takes its time and nearly wears out its welcome, until one of the female characters takes off her top, tells the gawking villager men "I thought you Greeks only liked little boys!" then dives into the water and is promptly and bloodily dismembered by the freed rubber-suit monster, effectively turning the second half of the film into a monster movie. The thing about the monster is, he looks fine when they just flash his teeth, but when they make the mistake of showing his full body in full daylight for a full second, he looks like a 50's horror cast-off that was found in a dumpster. 

The lousy special effects kill off most of the tension, and the film has to rely on Shelton's frock somehow getting even more wet than it did before. Blood Omen also leans into a late major reveal that behind the painting Deborah is restoring is an ancient fresco, which shows a naked virgin bowing to a historical painter's interpretation of the monster, who is sporting a massive, prehistoric boner. What a metaphor for the film.