And You Call Yourself a Scientist – our favorite website for in-depth reviews of exploitation cinema – offers up their analysis of TINTORERA! – a 1970s shark-attack opus in which most of the mayhem is inflicted on – rather than by – the sharks:
It was foolish of me, I suppose, when I reviewed The Jaws Of Death last April, to assume that I had seen the worst that exploitation film had to offer in terms of real killing of the elasmobranchic kind. Perhaps it was more of a hope than an assumption. After all, if exposure to exploitation cinema teaches anything, it is that no matter what you’ve seen, somewhere out there, there’s something bigger, darker, uglier, weirder, sicker, funnier. Not for nothing is the theme song of the germinal mondo film, Mondo Carne, entitled simply, “More”.
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But this is not the most bizarre thing about Tintorera; not by a long shot. This is, in all sincerity, one of the most peculiar films I have ever seen, thanks to its meandering pace and its haphazard melding of irreconcilable story elements, and to the mid-film emergence of a subplot that even most exploitation films wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. And this, finally, is the most exasperating thing of all about Tintorera: much as I want to hate this film with an unqualified hate, I am forced to admit that in those merciful periods when random marine life isn’t being massacred right and left, it’s rather, well, interesting. Not good; not well-structured; not well-paced; not well-written, or directed, or acted; but….interesting.
If your taste runs more toward popular entertainment of the current variety, Brian Collins of Horror Movie a Day takes a brief break from savoring gruesome gorefests in order to review MONSTERS VS. ALIENS – which he quite likes:
…before anyone balks at the idea of it not being a horror movie – correct, it’s NOT a horror movie in the traditional sense (i.e. scares/violence/gore), but it DOES gain most of its mileage out of referencing horror movies, particularly those from the 1950s. So it is horror fans, not 8 year old kids, that will be enjoying the myriad references to The Fly, The Blob, Them!, etc., and thus in turn enjoying the film as a whole.
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Like the other [DreamWorks animated] films, it doesn’t hold a candle to Pixar’s best, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Like Igor, it’s nice to see these movies finding a new way to appeal to multiple generations and tastes (i.e. genre fans), and the lack of “timely” jokes will ensure that it will remain a favorite for future generations, while the Shark Tales of the world become irrelevant due to their reliance on jokes that won’t mean anything to anyone born after their release date.