More Giant Monsters: “Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep”

CNN reported today that a six-legged octopus has been discovered in the ocean somewhere. It may be a genetic deformity—I only skimmed the article—but the marine biologists who discovered it dubbed it “Henry the Hexapus.” Can “Perry the Pentapus” be far behind? I dunno, but this seems as good a time as any to review Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep, a Sci-Fi Channel original movie.

Pretty close to 50% of the Sci-Fi Channel’s movies involve gigantic animals (Boa, Python, Boa vs. Python, etc.), and this one falls squarely into that category. This time around, it turns to the mythological gigantic sea creature to provide its central narrative device. And in case you didn’t quite figure it out from the title—the kraken is a giant squid.

Giant tentacled beasties (of the deep) always make for good monsters, because, let’s face it: tentacles are creepy. That said, squids make particularly hateable monsters. Much more so than octopi, in my opinion. I’m not exactly sure why, but I think it has something to do with octopi’s natural, laid-back charm. As a kid, my parents used to take me to Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, and I’d plant myself in front of the octopus tank and watch that pulsating little ball of protoplasm as it did nothing in particular. With their fierce intelligence and rectangular eyes, octopi come off like the slackers of the animal kingdom. They’re smart enough to pull the cork out of a bottle in order to get at the food inside, but they’re very type-B personalities. Mostly they just hang out on the ocean floor watching the oceanic version of Adult Swim, and occasionally grabbing a crab when they get hungry. You kind of get the impression that if you hung out with an octopus socially, he’d be the kind of guy who’d maybe give you good legal advice or do your taxes and then grab beers and discuss the latest episode of The Shield.

Squid, on the other hand, are kind of jerk-y. They dart around the water and appraise you with a sense of smug superiority, while they flash different colors. If you asked a squid if he wanted to grab a beer, he’d probably be all like “Pffft. No. How much you pay for those shoes? I blow that much in ink in a day. Get out of here, you low-class mook, before I grab you with my powerful tentacles and devour you with my horny beak.” If squid wore clothes, they’d wear a lot of Abercrombie and Fitch and feel all badass about it. You know, until some hungry sperm whale came around and ate them.

So, in a roundabout fashion, that brings us to Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep. Apparently, simply having a jack-hole squid squidding around and dragging people into the briny depths wasn’t enough to support a 90 minute movie, so they hung it on a fairly scanty plotline regarding a Greek opal and/or mask for something. Victoria Pratt (of Cleopatra 2525, uh, fame?) plays Nicole, a marine archaeologist (?) who unearths said opal from a shipwreck off what I assume are supposed to be the Greek Isles. Jack Scalia (who I want to say is slumming here, but really, who are we kidding) plays a mobster on the skids who needs to recover the opal in order to restore his standing in the family. Because the mafia is apparently big into the looting of undersea treasure.

These two screw around for the better part of the movie’s run time, while the Kraken shows up every so often to eat some poor diver that tries to recover the opal. You have to give some credit to the screenwriters Sean Keller and Nicholas Garland (it took two people to come up with this?) for not being ambitious to a fault, but would have killed them to flesh out the story some? Scalia plays pretty much the same character he’s always played, and no explanation is given as to why the family is ready to whack him or what they plan on doing with the opal. Making the world’s biggest mood ring? It was nice to see that Victoria Pratt’s midriff is just as comely as it was a decade ago on 2525 (admittedly, I watched the show mostly for her, because I found the prospect of a tightly-packaged blonde named “Sarge” oddly erotic—just one more of those places in my psyche we probably shouldn’t delve too deeply into). And it’s a good thing she’s still a looker, too, since she really doesn’t have any real acting talent per se.

Anyway, at some point she and her intrepid crew of vapid pretty people ascertain that the kraken is protecting the opal. Seems like a waste of a perfectly good kraken to me, but whatever. As it is, the titular kraken is just a fuzzy, not-terribly-realistically-rendered CGI effect. Most of the time, the flailing tentacles and thrashing actors aren’t even synched into the same frame. Doomed divers slash the water with their dive knives while a squid arm a good five feet away starts bleeding. The kraken doesn’t even bother to pull down any boats. What the hell kind of kraken doesn’t destroy boats? That’s kind of how they established their monster cred.

I’m sure you can probably figure out the rest from here, and the movie ends about the way you’d expect–pretty much wussing out of dispatching the kraken. In fairness, these aren’t the most competent heroes in the world, and nothing they do in the film gives any indication they could even aggravate the kraken, let alone kill it. Still, it irks me to think that big, asshole of a squid is zipping about down there, guarding the opal and probably making nasty comments about your hair. Where is Kirk Douglas when you need him?