THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.
by Jarrod Jones. It’s your standard monster movie premise: a family member dies and leaves behind some creaky old house where their attractive offspring discover terrors beyond reckoning. The Tank, a conventional bit of beastly, period-set family horror from Scott Walker — his first directorial outing in a decade, following The Frozen Ground with Nicolas Cage — sticks to this formula like Super Glue.
Its setup is cute enough. Pet store owners Ben (Matt Whelan) and Jules (Luciane Buchanan) discover that they, along with their adorable daughter Reia (Zara Nausbaum), have become the inheritors of an idyllic Oregan coastal property following the death of Ben’s mother. But wait — Ben has no memory of this place. Isn’t that strange? “Some families have secrets,” a disheveled lawyer (Mark Mitchinson) tells them. “You’d be surprised what people find out once a loved one dies.”
Like I said, conventional. The Tank certainly isn’t the first poisoned inheritance movie I’ve seen this year. It’s not even the second. To his credit, Walker attempts a Seventies period affect — floofy haircuts, Led Zepplin t-shirts, and a beige station wagon being the limits of his time-specific ambitions — to give it a certain distinction. It isn’t very convincing, but it does keep those pesky iPhones from intruding on the isolation that any decent beast-stalking movie should have.
A proper monster thriller should also have some human drama that connects us to its characters, and Walker couches some in slow-trickle reveals throughout the first third of the film. It’s there where Ben and Jules unearth vague, moldering newspaper clippings about Ben’s troubled mother, who may or may not have had something to do with the death of his father and sister. Ben’s no help in the memory department; this all happened before he was born.
His mother’s diary is more helpful, providing a thinly-sketched account of a fateful night in 1946 that seems to exonerate her from wrongdoing. More curiously — or ham-fistedly, take your pick — it also waxes poetic over the property’s newly-installed water tank, which provides “sweet, nourishing” hydration. Ben and his family will have to take her word on that; the house’s faucets mostly spit out black ink. The tank also holds small, peculiar dead things that Jules, who you’ll recall co-owns a pet shop, defines as “amphibious.” Was Brita a thing in the Seventies?
You know what happens next. Day turns to night. Doors begin to creak open on their own. The kid checks under her bed for the boogeyman. Someone is startled by a noise — it’s just Ben playing around. Then it’s the dog. Aided by the persistent soundtrack of an otherworldly grumble that sounds like a dying Chevy, Walker builds a sense of dread — or is that boredom?
You can excuse long, dull stretches of people shuffling through dark hallways with concerned looks etched on their faces, provided there’s an impressive-looking beast waiting to greet them. The Tank has one, an oil-slick, xenomorphic toad (realized by performer Regina Hegemann), who prefers the vintage of human blood. For a monster realized through mostly practical effects, it does the trick. Its diet is restricted to periphery characters, however, some of whom are gobbled up without the dignity of a single line reading. The monster wouldn’t dare eat Ben, Jules, or their little girl — that would be rude.
So we wait for this agreeable family (Whelan is especially good, lending a genial weariness to his role) to jury rig some contraption to lure the beast to its doom. Considering how little story is in The Tank, it takes longer than it should. As I watched them trudge toward their assured victory, something truly alarming occurred to me: didn’t they own a pet store before all this? Who’s feeding the puppies?
5 out of 10
The Tank drops on Blu-ray and DVD on June 27. It’s available to stream now.
Written and directed by Scott Walker.
Cinematography by Aaron Morton.
Starring Luciane Buchanan, Matthew Whelan, Zara Nausbaum, Regina Hegemann, Jack Barry, and Holly Shervey.
Produced by Matthew Metcalfe, Peter Touche, Andrea Scarso, Mark Gooder, Alex Breingan, Doris Pfardrescher, and Alison Thompson.
Rated R for tame mauling, and some salty language said under duress.
More DoomRocket Reviews:
Oh no, The Flash isn’t very good
Crack the first volume of Skip and Loafer, Misaki Takamatsu’s charming teen life manga
In Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, a Wall-Crawler gets a cliffhanger
