Recently released on blu-ray, the Mexican-British co-production Tintorera is ripe for re-evaluation.(1) With the tagline “Where Hot Summer Nights Turn Into Cold Terror”, Tintorera is a most peculiar combination of shark-attack movie and summer-love film – think Jules and Jim meets Jaws. Long derided by critics for being two movies that really have nothing to do with each other – one reviewer called it “a wholly ridiculous fusion of shark footage [and] softcore frolicking”(2) – Tintorera may prove on closer examination to be more meaningfully coherent than previously thought. The avian attacks in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) also seem unrelated to the human relationships in that film, but are they? Tintorera’s writer/director René Cardona Jr is no Hitchcock, although Cardona did direct Attack of the Birds (aka Birds of Prey, 1986) as an homage to the Master.
Tintorera (aka Tintorera: Tiger Shark or Tintorera: Killer Shark) actually makes a connection between its sex and violence subplots early on in the dialogue when Steven (Hugo Stiglitz), a businessman vacationing in Cancún, remarks that he’d “rather hunt the tintorera in a bikini that walks along the beach.” Standing on his yacht, Steven eyes the bathing beauties cavorting in the sand, with the camera zooming in on female body-parts as targets from his point of view, much as the underwater camera, representing the shark’s perspective, moves in on women swimming in the sea. Soon the middle-aged but wealthy womaniser Steven has teamed up with a young gigolo named Miguel (Andrés García) and, using the latter’s seductive patter and the former’s fancy boat as bait to lure women to bed, the men “spear” a series of female conquests even as they penetrate sharks with their harpoon-guns. Thus the men go hunting for sharks by day and hunting for women at night, with both fish and females as prey to their consuming appetite.
Yet after bedding a nubile British tourist named Patricia (Fiona Lewis), Steven finds himself developing feelings for her. She wants fidelity, but when he admits he’s not “sure it’s love or just a physical attraction,” she leaves him for Miguel, with Steven jealously eyeing her as she flirts with the other man on the beach. Patricia sleeps with Miguel and afterward goes swimming in the nude, with the predatory “shark-cam” stalking her body. Modelled on – some would say a rip-off of – the opening scene in Jaws (1975) where “an underwater shot, now moving up to the surface between the girl’s legs, precedes the shark’s attack”, this scene where Patricia is preyed upon also represents the “danger of sexuality and the displacement of the latter onto the shark”.(3) In this case, the shark is Steven’s animalistic aggression – his jealous anger at her combined with his violent possessiveness. The shark literally bites Patricia in half, as if she were torn between the two men.
This love (or lust) triangle is soon re-formed when another beautiful British tourist, Gabriella (Susan George), takes up with the male duo, causing us to fear that she too might be torn asunder by their jealous rivalry. Given what happened to Patricia, we are not comforted to hear Gabriella say, “I have one love divided into two. It’s true – one love is for you [Steven], and the other part[!] is for Miguel.” Equally concerning are the love songs on the movie’s soundtrack, with lyrics like “No one could love me half[!] as much as you do” and “We’ll be together until we part[!].” Perhaps surprisingly (though it is the 1970s, the era of “free love”), the three characters together form a consensual ménage à trois, where male competition for the female – “I’ll bet I sleep with her before you do”; “Shall we go on the hunt?” – turns into a companionly sharing of her in bed: “You go first” – “After you, sir.” Significantly, this overcoming of macho rivalry and lustful possessiveness is made possible through a loosening of gender roles, with Gabriella looking at Miguel as he lies naked and prone on the bed (and not just his male gaze at her), and with Steven cooking breakfast at the stove, wearing nothing but a “feminine” apron that leaves him exposed from behind. Having overcome their fear of penetration (by a man, by the shark) that led to phallic violence, these formerly macho men now exchange Speedo underwear and homoerotic glances as well as Gabriella. Similarly, the men’s gynophobia, their fear of falling in love (as into the jaws of a vagina dentata?) that led to their serial “harpooning” of women, has turned into loving looks no longer driven by the desire to consume her.
And yet lurking below the surface of all these idyllic scenes of the threesome together – in bed, water skiing, seated in a boat – there lies the threat of resurgent jealousy, of something less evolved and more atavistic like the stalking shark, which would fight any rivals for its share of female prey. So it is that after amiably smiling at one another during an outing in a boat, the happy “throuple” find that, once they have dived underwater, appetite and aggression return as the shark hones in on Gabriella’s body and then, when Miguel fails to hit it with a harpoon, rips the man apart. Earlier, Steven had said that he liked watching Gabriella with Miguel, but even back then his gaze seemed ambivalent. Now the polyamorous threesome is brought to an end when the threat of possessiveness and competitiveness rears its ugly head.
Will Steven be defeated by his own atavistic instincts, or will he triumph in his struggle with the beast below and finally achieve a form of “free love?” Tintorera’s last scenes feature two additional threesomes, more shark menace and Steven’s climactic confrontation with the phallic predator (and the predatory side of himself). Tintorera also has two endings, one on the DVD and another that concludes the extended version of the film, which can often be found on YouTube. Is Tintorera merely “a haphazard melding of irreconcilable story elements” as its critics have claimed?(4) I don’t think so, but you decide!
1: Tintorera is now available on Region A blu-ray from Kino Lorber/Scorpion Releasing, and the disc includes an audio commentary by Troy Howarth and Rod Barnett. Prospective viewers should be warned that this film contains scenes with on-screen spear-gunning and bleeding of marine life.
2: Nathaniel Thompson, ed, DVD Delirium, volume 3, FAB Press, 2006, p. 551.
3: Stephen Heath, “Jaws, Ideology, and Film Theory”, in Bill Nichols, ed, Movies and Methods, volume 2, University of California Press, 1985, pp. 512, 513.
4: Et Al., “Tintorera (1977)”, and you call yourself a scientist, 9 July 2020, https://andyoucallyourselfascientist.com/2020/07/09/tintorera-1977/.
Douglas Keesey is the author of Twenty First Century Horror Films, Contemporary Erotic Cinema and Neo-Noir: Contemporary Film Noir – all published by Kamera Books.