“The Tank” is a polished period piece thriller set in the 1970s Pacific Northwest, but filmed in New Zealand, with a mostly-Kiwi cast-and-crew. Because nothing looks like the undeveloped past of Washington and Oregon’s coasts like the rocky shores of “The Land of the Long White Cloud.”

The film is a creature feature, just the sort of thing New Zealand has a natural advantage in producing, with all those special effects shops that spun out of the “Lord of the Rings” universe. The creature, when we see it, is pretty good. We’d expect no less.

But film schools far and wide should pick up copies of this Scott Walker (the Cage and Cusack thriller “The Frozen Ground” was his) B-picture, just to demonstrate how you should never wait this long to get a genre piece like this going, and to point out the perils of too much foreshadowing.

Our heroine, Jules (Luciane Buchanan) is in veterinary school and running a pet store with her husband Ben (Matt Whelan). Their seven year-old daughter Raia (Zara Nausbaum) is here for her screams, later. But her function in the first act is to give somebody for mum to explain the animals to, and to get into the details of just what sort of creature they’re going to find themselves confronting when they drive north to check out some coastal property Ben’s inherited from his mad-but-now-dead mother.

But we’ve seen a 1946 prologue in which a man was snatched and dragged into a huge cistern on the property, the “Tank” of the title. I dare say that word was chosen because who remembers what a cistern is these days?

An endless build-up towards the bloody finale includes Ben’s share of the foreshadowing, laying out in detail what he’s found in the old shed on the long-abandoned property. “Convenient” items, to say the least.

And then WHAMMO, we’re in the action and hanging with Ben as he tries out some silly man stuff and with Jules as she identifies their threat and works the problem towards a way of fighting and defeating it.

The dialogue is bordeline Bot-created — generic in the extreme.

“Doesn’t this place make you uneasy? Are you SURE about this?”

There’s an old diary, a too-helpful real-estate agent, no phone service and on and on the checklist of weary horror tropes goes.

But “The Tank” wouldn’t have been half-bad if they’d moved the imminent peril to earlier in the second act, wouldn’t have been borderline-awful if Walker had worked out a more original or exciting finale, if somebody’d talked him out of trying to give his starlet a Sigourney-in-“Aliens” catchphrase.

At least New Zealand, the specialest special effect of them all, comes out of this lovelier and more rainforest lush than ever.

Rating: R for some violence/bloody images and (profanity)

Cast: Luciane Buchanan, Matt Whelan, Zara Nausbaum and Ascia Maybury

Credits: Scripted and directed by Scott Walker. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:32