During the hottest month of summer, Turner Classic Movies is going to do their best to keep you out of the ocean with their month long Deep Sea Cinema series.
Starting on July 14 (and running on subsequent Thursdays in July), Deep Sea Cinema brings all manner of denizens of the deep to the forefront, particularly movies featuring sharks and squids.
The action begins promptly at 8:00 pm each Thursday, with the first Thursday showcasing “realistic” depiction of sharks such as Howard Hawks’ Tiger Shark (1932), The Sea Chase (1955), The Sharkfighters (1956), Killer Shark (1950), Shark’s Treasure (1975), and the “shark-adjacent” films, The Last of the Pagans (1935) and Death Curse of Tartu (1966).
The second night of programming on July 21 swaps the shark for the octopus, with a wide variety of takes on the many-tentacled creature. The night starts with a deep sea diving adventure Below the Sea (1933), before going whole hog into science fiction-style monsters in the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion fear fest It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), which continues in the wild Tentacles (1977), and the gonzo Warlords of Atlantis (1978) that features a giant octopus as a threshold guardian to a hidden civilization.
The last night on July 28 continues with a sea monster theme, sure to satisfy long-time creature feature aficionados. The films that round out Deep Sea Cinema include: Mysterious Island (1961), the original Godzilla (1954), Hammer Film’s The Lost Continent (1968), The Monster that Challenged the World (1957), Roger Corman’s Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961), The Giant Behemoth (1959), and the original Moby Dick (1930), to add some prestige to the last night of programming.
Tune in for all the screaming and splashing, starting on July 14 on TCM.