Director – Jeffrey Bloom

Just moments after the opening shot, shit, in the opening shot a granny is sucked screaming, into the sand of an LA beach while her dog and a harbor patrolman look on. Sadly the patrolman, Harry, knows the old lady and all the more traumatic for him, used to date her daughter Catherine. It might not go any farther than that as far as Harry is concerned, except that the following night, in a great cross cutting of scenes Harry gets it on with his sexy foreign stewardess girlfriend while simultaneously the granny's dog gets its head chewed off on the same stretch of beach. Now the daughter, a sensitive artist type, arrives in town and Harry gets all twisted up with inrequited "harbor patrol" duties.

Meanwhile, on the scene to investigate, is a pair of perfect character actor cops. Uncouth, unkempt and unruly ex-Chicago cop Royko (Burt Young) and his scolding father type Lieutenant (Otis Young) a stern and overly serious "black cop". Permissably perplexed, the cops have nothing to go on until the next day when a rich bitch on the beach gets her legs chewed on. Enter the big man on precinct, tough as nails Capitan John Saxon (Cannibal Apocalypse) who orders the entire beach exhumed by a backhoe. Nothing.

For no reason except perhaps to compensate for the relative timidity of scares thusfar in the film, the script resorts to a simple "unexplained noise + cat jumping out of nowhere" ploy, which on second thought only morosely emphasizes the previous fact. As if that weren't enough. When Harry's goofy partner, affectionately called "Hoagy", parts ways with his girlfriend, she gets sexually assaulted under the pier but throws the guy off. Crawling towards her, apparently while penetrating the sand, his member is brutally removed by the sand creature. Follow wiener joke. Next it's Harry's girlfriends turn to go under, and while the all the backhoes in the world didn't find shit the first time, this time one guy with a spade is able to find her eyeball, solidly placing her in the dead meat category and sealing Catherine's place at the top while nonetheless steeling Harry's resolve.



At this point it's clear that despite the best efforts of a generally talented crew of actors this movie is not going to deliver on the serious meat, or creeps. John Saxon himself cracks down on his boys and pushes them toward the inevitable sideline role all cops play in this type of watered down everyday-quasi-hero horror flick. Harry will inevitably discover the solution somehow linked to his and Catherine's past relationship. And while the cops will execute the final actual kill, Harry will be the artistic father of the operation, and receive the movie's only real hero medal, the girl.

Despite its relative predictability, Blood Beach holds great promise, never altogether delivered, but certainly promised. There's an assload of talent here, and the entire concept is brilliant, seeing people getting sucked into the sand and gored is awesome, but there's not enough of the latter to balance the former, and the strain between moments of each is only just bridgeable by intoxication.

email Seth