Borgarkeri A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

2freensel I saw this movie before reading any reviews, and I thought it was very funny. I was very surprised to see the overwhelmingly negative reviews this film received from critics.

Orla Zuniga It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Leofwine_draca Without a doubt the most BORING JAWS rip-off you're ever likely to see, I had the misfortune to catch the extended two-hour-plus cut of this film – and did I regret it! A silly sexploitation film masquerading as a monster flick, TINTORERA is utterly inoffensive throughout, aside from one key area which I'll come to later. Now, I'm a great fan of trash movies, and I also love Mexican flicks: horror films, masked wrestlers, you name it. Knowing that Rene Cardona Jr. delivered such cheese as TREASURE OF THE AMAZON and NIGHT OF A THOUSAND CATS, I was pretty excited about watching this flick. Heck, his DAD made the cult B-movie NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES, so how could his son go wrong? Well he did, with this misfiring, yawn-inducing effort at a sex film.The main problem with TINTORERA as a sex film is that it's boring. The sexy is silly rather than sleazy, and even when a couple of women avoid rape by openly giving themselves to the rapists you can't find offence. No, the focus of this film is on the nudity, and there's a ton of it, although some male viewers might find it a bit dubious when I say that MOST of the nudity in the film is from the two guys...do I REALLY want to see near-constant butt shots from these chaps? Of course, there's a fair share of topless and full nudity from the women too, but it really does get boring after a while. Amusingly, two British actresses, Susan George and Fiona Lewis, turn up for the sole purpose of getting naked. Lewis appears for the first twenty minutes and wanders around topless before getting eaten by a shark (nobody notices – not even the viewer) while the awful George shows up for forty minutes in the middle of the flick and appears (very briefly) naked. We're stuck with her absolutely diabolical acting for a good long time, though.What about the sharks? Well, truth be told, this film DOES have some of the bloodiest death-by-shark scenes in any movie. When somebody bites it (or rather gets bitten) here, the sea around them turns blood red for about a mile and body parts are everywhere. The problem is that there are only two such scenes in a two-hour-plus flick. So what does the rest of the film entail? Two guys sitting around chatting, sailing, drinking, and screwing. That sums it up nicely. Sometimes they speak in English, sometimes in Spanish, but it doesn't matter because they never say anything of merit. Now, I liked Hugo Stiglitz when I saw him in NIGHTMARE CITY, but this must be his worst role. He's just creepy and dull, if those two traits are possible in one character. Andres Garcia is mildly amusing I guess, but he doesn't have anything to work with other than his face-value attractive womaniser role.I tried to like this film, and I looked out for 'fun' stuff. There is a little. The underwater photography is top-notch, and there are some hilarious Darth Vader-style breathing effects dubbed over the shark. But it's all so routine – so routine that I can't remember how the shark actually dies at the end, although I only finished watching this film two days ago. So all that's left to write about is the offensive bit, and that's the real-life animal killing. If you thought those Italian cannibal flicks had too much of it, wait until you see what's in store here: guys harpooning fish over and over again, for minutes on end. At least a few dozen real creatures died so this movie could get shot. Watching a fish – sometimes sharks – writhing in their death throes and bleeding all over the place is NOT my idea of a good time. It's cheap and it's utterly reprehensible. The worst bit is probably when they shoot a fish and we get a close up of the poor creature bleeding through its gills. Not nice! This sort of stuff normally doesn't bother me but it's so graphic and in-your-face here that it's impossible to ignore. This is why TINTORERA ranks as one of the worst films I've seen, an utter waste of time with no redeeming values whatsoever. I guess this is one of those movies where the shorter US cut is actually BETTER; at least there's less of this mess to sit through.

trashgang Trying to make use of the success of a flick isn't easy. The slasher era was a perfect example were everybody tried to copy Friday The 13th (1980) amongst others. But just before the slasher era Steven Spielberg had a lot of success with the gruesome Kaws (1975). A lot of flicks tried to copy Jaws and Tintorera was trying to do that.It failed completely even as it had a few names from the genre. Susan George just came from Straw Dogs (1971) and Fiona Lewis was just casted in The Fury (1978). Being both English actors they had to play together with big names from the Mexican flicks. Hugo Stiglitz is known for Nightmare City (1980). But the main lead should have been the shark itself as it did in Jaws. Sadly, here the love stories involved were more important. Especially the gratuitous nudity by all girls involved. The shark itself was taken from stock footage and no gore is even seen in this flick. The shark do attacks but it's also easy to see that it wasn't done with the actors. Still, this flick is hunted down for so many reasons and is today available on DVD, but the search for so many is the VHS with an excellent sleeve which really looks great. Only the flick itself wasn't.Gore 1/5 Nudity 2,5/5 Effects 1/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5

Neil Welch Hooray for the internet.Tintorera is a movie I had read about since my youth, and I knew it to be an exotic shark-based action adventure with some sauciness, featuring two of my favourite English actresses of the early 70s, Susan George (Straw Dogs) and Fiona Lewis (Villain), and furthermore the sauciness meant that there was a more than passing likelihood that they might be skimpily dressed. Or less.As I said, hooray for the internet. Tintorera was found.Oh dearie dearie me.It turns out that my wish to see Mesdames George and Lewis in states of deshabille was sadly inadequate justification for sitting through, how can I put it, 90 minutes of tripe. The two English roses are more or less incidental, and one of them - sorry for the spoiler - becomes shark num-nums fairly early on in an almost exact retread of the opening sequence of Jaws. Except for the suspense, thrills and music.Most of the film appears to concentrate on what, apart from their skirt chasing, would appear to be a fairly overt gay relationship between the two main (male) characters.Irrespective of the sexual proclivities of the two fellows who spend much of the movie prancing around either in their bathers or bare-bummed, this film simply isn't very good.

gchoa I consider myself a genuine fan of bad cinema as much as the next guy but this film was truly awful, in an often hilariously inept kind of way. I understand that this was an exercise in exploitation but it just seemed to lack any real sense of cohesion whatsoever. Whatever sense of suspense and/or horror the movie strives for is invariably trumped by a total sense of ineptitude and absurdity. To add insult to injury, the relentless use of actual real-life footage depicting the merciless slaughter of marine life of every kind only made an already tough movie going experience almost unbearable.Sitting through this movie is like rubbernecking one's way past a bad pile-up on the freeway involving a caravan of clowns or circus performers.