Director: Richard Jefferies
Notable Cast: James Earl Jones, Martin Kove, Mary Louise
Weller, Deborah Shelton, Lydia Cornell, Jose Ferrer, Lila Kedrova
Between the cast, the writers, and a ‘creative consultant’ credit
to Brian Trenchard Smith, I was positively excited for Blood Tide to get
its new Blu Ray release from Arrow Video. Could this be another long-lost forgotten
cult gem that was discovered while dragging the waters? On paper, absolutely.
It reads like a sure-fire hit with its combination of Greek island cult
elements, an ancient monster, and the horror meets adventure narrative. However,
Blood Tide is a film that oddly evades ever dedicating itself to any of
those pieces. Instead, it leans heavily into the convoluted dramatic tension of
its characters and takes itself wildly seriously as it loosely ties together
its genre elements. At the core, there is a great film, but the results of this
1982 aquatic thriller is far from there and the film ends up being more of a slog than the film it looks like on paper.
When Neil (Kove) and his wife (Weller) end up on a Greek
island looking for his sister (Shelton), they stumble onto an archeologist
(Jones) who is trying to uncover an ancient mystery. When he accidentally
unleashes a water monster that is hunting the local women, they must all band
together to figure out what the creature is and how to stop it.