Tintorera: Killer Shark (1977)

This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Highly Overrated But Still Good

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Tintorera is a pulp fantasy straight out of those early sixties men's adventure magazines that featured point of impact painted covers. It's not grindhouse junk cashing in on the Jaws phenomenon despite its reputation and reviews. The photography is excellent, far beyond what the viewer would expect. Mexican movie stars Hugo and Andres work well as an acting team in a story that blends wild R-rated tourist-sex with tiger shark hunting at a Mexican resort town. The scenes of British actress Susan George having a threesome with Hugo and Andres are still eye-opening 40 years later. In the beginning, Hugo feels sorry when he sees shark hunters hauling the sharks on board and clubbing them to death. He changes his opinion when the big killer shark turns tourists in gore and teams up with Andres to get the monster. Like a lot of films about wild life killing humans, people do dumb things (in this film because they've been drinking) and get horribly killed. If the sight of gore and sharks being bashed in the head is offensive to you, skip this movie.

Horror always manages to find the secret fears of a generation, and this snapshot of the dying tail of the 70's senses something dangerous in the waters the fashionably hedonistic elite had jumped into - beautiful beaches, frank sex, blue waters, and an all devouring emptiness swimming up from beneath, all teeth and dark eyes.Three times in this film main characters decide they will enjoy a rational, comfortable, idyllic, liberated and jealousy free relationship, and each time their relationship is torn apart by... well, a big shark. As a metaphor goes it's a bit on the nose, but as a stand in for all the messy jealousies, rivalries, hurts and disease that circle the lifestyle portrayed, a big hungry shark does bring a certain simplicity - it certainly saves on dialogue. The characters may believe they are in paradise, but reality has no such illusions. The disinterest and offhand violence of the characters let's us know all is not right with them, and the world around them reflects these traits back in it's purest form. A hungry fish.None of this is to say this is a GOOD movie, which it is not by any means. It does, however, capture something greater than the "soft core with a shark" tag indicates... which explains the perhaps otherwise inexplicable fact that people still talk about this film today.

Despite the fact that most of them are complete crap, I do actually consider myself a fan of the Jaws rip-offs. I've had a copy of this film for a long while but I've continually put off watching it, and the reason for that is simply down to the running time; 127 minutes is far, far too long for a silly and trashy Jaws rip off. That being said, this film is more like a trashy and exploitative soap opera than a Jaws rip-off, but even so; the runtime is still far too long. It almost feels like the scenes of the shark have been thrown in as an afterthought, and that possibly could be the case; as aside from a few minor events, the shark hardly figures in the movie at all. The plot is actually quite complicated, but to cut a long story short; what we basically have is two men who meet on holiday and soon fall out over a girl. Soon after that they become friends again and decide to go womanising together, several times. They're so busy with their womanising that they don't realise that some of their girlfriends are being picked off by a hungry tiger shark! It's a shame that the film is more like a soap opera than a horror movie really because the horror parts of the film are actually not bad, it's just the dull and tedious 'drama' side of it that lets it down. The film really does drag far too often, and that's really not what you want from a film that is supposed to be fun. The version of the film that I saw looks like it had been pieced together from two different sources as half of it was in English (dubbed) and the other half was in Spanish. This actually gives the film a rather surreal feel as the language is constantly chopped and changed. When the shark actually does feature, we do at least get some good gore with it and several of these sequences are actually really well worked. The film is somewhat notorious for its animal killing scenes and that's hardly surprising because plenty of fish get butchered and it's not nice viewing - worse than Cannibal Holocaust, that is for sure! The underwater scenes are really good, however - but a lot of them are probably just documentary footage spliced into the film. It all boils down to a decent enough conclusion, but I cant bring myself to really like this film because it's just too much of a mess. Cool title though.

Silly me! Here I was under the impression of owning a Tiger Shark horror movie, but instead there's just a copy of the X-rated Love Boat Chronicles in my DVD-collection! What the hell was this? I absolutely love low budget Jaws rip-off's – the trashier they are, the more I love them – but this has got to be one of the most incoherent and insufferably tedious exploitation movies ever made! "Tintorera" could be described as sex, tequila and sunny beaches. Oh, and a little bit of shark-action too, maybe. Now this may sound like crazy fun but NOT when you have to endure lousy acting performances and lamentable dialogs for 127 damn long minutes. Who the hell is interested in an extra long version of a crap film anyway, especially when the additional footage only serves more crap? This movie has no redeeming elements whatsoever, since even the sleazy scenes are uninspired and boring as hell. Hugo Stiglitz, who oddly resembles Daniel Stern from "Home Alone", plays a millionaire who parked his yacht in front of a tourist beach resort and stares at the girls in their colorful bikinis. He falls in love with a brunette, loses her again because their summer-love relationship is getting too serious and catches her cheating on him with playboy Miguel. The two guys become best friends and the girl gets devoured by a tiger shark without anybody realizing she's gone. Good riddance, I guess. Together, Steven and Miguel seduce a handful of other girls before the both fall for English beauty Gabriella. They then start the most implausible and retarded tree-way relationship ever filmed. Since Gabriella cannot or does not want to choose between her two lovers, "Tintorera" suddenly turns – for nearly 45 minutes! – into a romantic melodrama with few nudity (only male nudity, actually) and really pointless images of three uninteresting people talking. You honestly pray for the shark to pop up again and bring closure to this painfully soporific relationship. He/she does eventually, when the macho boys try to impress Gabrielle with their nasty shark-hunting games, and after killing Miguel this chapter ends suddenly, like it was just a tiny little sub plot. Steven returns to partying on the beach and taking random beauty-queens back to his boat for sex. When that annoying tiger shark kills yet another one of his girlfriends, Steven gets really upset goes after his nemesis. "Tintorera" stands for total boredom and irritation. The underwater footage of the titular animal scouting the bottom of the sea is nifty and professional, but I suspect most of these scenes were 'borrowed' from documentaries or something. It's rather infuriating how this movie contains truckloads of sequences in which fish and harmless smaller shark species are tortured and killed for no reason other than 'sport' and 'amusement'. I'm pretty sure it's real, as I don't see how you can fake impaling innocent little sea creatures. Perhaps it all was archive footage as well, but I don't think so judging by the diving suits the hunters wore, and even if it's all fake it still remains poor padding. I'm normally a great admirer of the gorgeous starlets Susan George, Fiona Lewis and Priscilla Barnes but honestly no one was capable of saving this disastrous production. My advise is to skip it, but if for some reason you do feel the urge of tracking it down, make sure it isn't the long version.