Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep

I would say there’s trouble when there are three nouns in a movie’s title and two of them are inaccurate. The giant critter in this movie isn’t a kraken (it’s a squid, which is some interpretations of the word, but not most) and the water isn’t at all deep. There are tentacles, though, so give credit where credit is due.

The boxcover also promises “high seas adventure”, but there isn’t a shot in the movie where you can’t see the shore, so that seems a loose interpretation of “high seas” as well.

It starts with a prologue in which a small boy named Ray watches his parents killed by a sea monster. That sort of thing can scar a person, and in this case, it causes him to grow up to be Jerry O’Connell’s brother Charlie, playing a character. Thirty years later, he’s still searching for the beast that killed Mom and Dad when he crosses paths with an archaeologist named Nicole (Victoria Pratt, from the terrible series Mutant X) who is searching for a giant Opal famed in Greek history. For some reason, this opal has been lost somewhere off the Pacific Northwest, so we assume some ancient Greek sailor was none too swift with the navigation.

In an amazing coincidence, the kraken and the opal are in exactly the same stretch of water. Apparently, the kraken is the opal’s protector, and kills anyone who touches it and sinks their boat, which really raises the question of how the hell it managed to get all the way from Greece. There follows many shots of divers swimming with video of squids of various sizes superimposed on them. There is also a gangster who is desperate to get his hands on the opal, since it once belonged to his family, and if he can recover it, it will make him an Official Original Greek Gangster. You know he’s gonna end up squid chow.

Terrible acting, horrible special effects, and a dumb plot. If you still want to see it, be my guest. I probably wouldn’t let these things stop me.
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