Review of Tintorera: Killer Shark

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.