The Red Tide Massacre

Yet another horror movie that I hadn't heard about prior to stumbling upon it here in 2024. And given my love of all things horror, of course I opted to sit down and watch what director John A. Russo had to offer. Now, the storyline in the movie was actually fair enough. Hold your horses, because I am not saying that writers Palmer Edward and Joe Majestic put together a fantastic script and storyline, far from it. In fact, it was a pretty generic storyline that was somewhat reminiscent of the 1980s creature features. However, the execution of the movie felt amateurish. There was nothing scary about the movie, and it was actually campy and cheesy, but not in a particularly enjoyable way. The acting performances in "The Red Tide Massacre" were fair. Again, nothing outstanding, but taking the limitations of the script into consideration, then the actors and actresses did fair jobs. I have to say that it was actress Susan Elle who carried the movie. Of the entire cast ensemble, I was only familiar with actors Michael Paré and Nils Allen Stewart. Something that worked well enough, despite it being cheesy effects, were the evolution of the mutation that happened to the convict. And the final creature design were actually fair enough if you like cheesy and campy monsters reminiscent of something from a 1950s movie. All in all, "The Red Tide Massacre" is not a must-watch movie if you're a horror fan. And it most definitely is not a movie that will grace my screen a second time. My rating of "The Red Tide Massacre" lands on a three out of ten stars.

I went into watching this with a totally open mind and bearing in mind I watch an awful lot of mediocre level horror movies on Amazon I think I've literally seen it all. So Red Tide Massacre. It's a hard film to sum up because one of the things that comes over very much during viewing is it's very very disjointed. It doesn't seem to quite know if it wants to be a out and out horror or a sort of Asylum type film with a high parody/comedy element and unfortunately as a result it rather fails at both. Firstly let's take the horror side. Well the premise is fine, toxic substances in the water create a mutant monster. Nothing original but few horror films are. Therefore it's all about execution. Here the execution is poor. The special effects are okay for this level film, the acting is okay and probably the actors would have benefited from a better script. But there's just absolutely no tension or build up to anything that happens. This rather kills any conceivable scare angle. This leads me to the second aspect of the movie. The disjointed slight comedy angle. The tension is never there because there are way too many breaks to cut to the lead character (A female reporter) who is making random reports about what's going on. Some of these, for example with a witness who thinks there's an alien are bordering on comical but totally ruin any fear factor. It's also almost a separate movie about this reporter who makes report's, goes back and tells her colleague what's going on and eventually sort of meets up with the sheriff's son and is suddenly injected into the actual main story. The movie swings from very telegraphed kills to the reporter and her stories (Usually just her standing on the beach) and her sudden romantic involvement with the sheriff's son who she seems to have a deep relationship with after a total of two dates. The culmination of all these is unfortunately beyond ridiculous and evidently just a device to get an ending involving both her and the sheriff's son where somehow the previously random monster has her address and is "Going after" her at her home. Like what?? Seriously?! Finally after a extremely weak scene where the monster which couldn't be killed by shooting is just run over and incapacitated by the female reporter we're treated to a environmental message about polluting the planet and a series of cut scenes to show us what's happened to all the surviving characters 6 months later (Presumably to pad out the running time). In summary this is not a good movie. It would actually have worked well as a spoof but it's not. And although I can see many of the actor's are capable they were given a awful script and nonsensical story to work with. One of those movies where you'd hope someone would have thought during pre production "Wait. What kind of movie are we trying to make here?" But sadly that evidently didn't happen.