The Tank is a creature feature that has way too much feature and not nearly enough creature. Though if the movie was wall-to-wall creature, I’d have to find a convenient cliff to jump off of.

The flick is about a family who inherit land on the Oregon coast. The location is great, the house is a dump… and it has a water tank (font of all thrills, amiright?). But soon slimy watery creatures are making funhouse noises outside at night… and, as we all know, shrieking eels always grow louder when they are about to feed on human flesh.

It takes a looooong time for this flick to actually remember it’s a horror movie, much less a creature feature. The funny thing is, I was ok with the atmospheric setup and the location shooting… I thought it was pretty solid and showed potential. Obviously if that’s all the movie was, it’d have been grossly oversold as a horror flick though.

The actual horror flick that it is? Exceedingly mediocre. The last half hour is aggressively dull and flabby. When it should be spiking the tension and making us jump, it just limps to a mediocre ending. It has no crackle, no tension, no fear. And the final “bad ass line” moment at the end? The sound mix was so off it couldn’t remotely elicit the “hell yeah!” it was aiming for.

At least the slimy amphibian creature is a decent practical effect. It’s head and maw are pretty neat, even if it has a tinge of demogorgon to it (the critters from A Quiet Place come to mind too). Unfortunately, any time they show the creature’s arms and hands, it becomes wildly evident it’s just a man in a very slimy rubber suit.

The Tank is ultimately a well shot failure filmed at a nice location. The acting is fine, the dialog works, but the actual creature feature part of the creature feature falls flat. I wanted to give it a decent score at first, but hat ending is just too flat for charity.

Score: 68