Very disappointed :(

Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Jeffrey Bloom directed this land based copy of "Jaws I & II" that stars John Saxon as Captain Pearson, in charge of investigating a series of disappearances along a beach in California, where it seems people were sucked into the sand. When mutilated remains later turn up, it is obvious that some unknown creature is living under the sand, and now it is a matter of finding and destroying it. Burt Young costars as Sergeant Royko. Disappointing film has a distinct lack of imagination in its story, with far too much talk, though some atmosphere. Famous for the tag-line "Just when you thought it was to go back in the water, you can't even get to it!" Not yet on DVD; Perhaps Shout/Scream Factory is the most likely to make that happen?

This one had been on my wish-list ever since I saw a few fragments of it when I was a little kid. But being a sober guy, I wasn't expecting much of it. And that was a good thing . Basically where "Jaws" made the water an unsafe place, "Blood Beach" tries to do this for the beach. But "Blood Beach" is very much inferior to Spielberg's classic. Mainly because "Blood Beach" is rather slow and boring. "Jaws", at times, also wasn't all that about action & horror, more about the characters really, but it had a fine plot structure, good dialogues and decent acting to keep things going. But I shall not just dismiss "Blood Beach" as a bad B-monster movie (though it certainly isn't a good one). The main attraction amongst the cast is John Saxon, who is the best actor of the lot, injects a nice amount of sarcasm in his role and simply has the best lines of the movie. Then there's Burt Young, who's just great as Sergeant Royko, bragging about Chicago all the time, eating various sort of junk-food in almost every scene and referring to someone's brain as "vegetable soup". The music was pretty memorable too, with a dark cello theme and some jazzy saxophones. And the beach-monster was just too weird. It looked like a giant, dusty, plastic flower. But unfortunately it's only shown in a few shots when it emerges from the sand near the end. The shots over the end credits leave room for a sequel ("Blood Beach 2: The Offspring", would have been a very appropriate title, I believe), but that never happened. "Blood Beach" could have been a cult classic, but unfortunately the movie feels just a bit too mainstream (and too uneventful also) for it to be one.

Blood Beach is a cheap movie with quite an original monster. This monster lives under the beach and sucks people into the sand which is quite scary, unfortunately there's very little monster action. You won't see much of the monster at all in fact, much less than for instance the boom mike or people sharing a candlelit meal which trust me you'll see plenty of.This isn't really horror, it's a romance with a couple of early deaths to keep your hopes up. There's also a drunk looking detective who spouts meaningless lines, often about Chicago and some totally random and not terribly good singing thrown in. My favourite character was the vet/doctor/coroner who puffs away on his unlit pipe and robs his lines of any meaning whatsoever with his glacier slow delivery.I wish this had been a movie about a sand monster as billed, that would have been quite fun but this film is just too slow and lacking in thrills to really be entertaining. It did leave me with one question though - is it wrong to date another woman the day after your girlfriend is eaten by a sand monster? Sure your friends will never mention her again and you'll show no signs of remembering her and your new romantic interest won't care but still..I think I'd leave it another day but maybe I'm just an old romantic.

How's this for a novel premise: a foul, carnivorous, subterranean monster whose exact origin is never properly disclosed feasts upon sundry teenagers, pretty young honeys, cops, bums and little old ladies who are all unfortunate enough to be treading on the beach when the sucker is on the prowl, thereby puzzling the local clueless and ineffectual authorities and whipping up a heretofore sleepy California coastal community into a frenzied tizzy. Boy, does that ever sound fairly similar to "Jaws," now doesn't it? Although the threadbare story ain't much, this surprisingly fun cheapo fright flick somehow manages to be quite entertaining. Veteran B-movie flatfoot John ("Black Christmas," "Welcome to Spring Break") Saxon as the dour, irascible police chief who's disgusted with the whole bloody mess and the ever-coarse Burt Young (Paulie in the "Rocky" films) as the boorish, jocund homicide detective investigating the baffling murders both delightfully grouch it up while longtime favorite unsung character actor Stefan ("Blue Sunshine," "Spellbinder") Gierasch gleefully commits thespic grand larceny as a pompous, pipe-smoking coroner with a ludicrously protracted drawl (Gierasch talks as if he graduated with top honors from the William Shatner Academy of Studiously Affected and Mannered Overdone Hammy Elocution). Despite several glaring flaws -- writer/director Jeffrey Bloom's hopelessly all-thumbs cinematic technique, sometimes excruciatingly sluggish pacing, drab performances by David Huffman and Marianna ("The Baby," "Messiah of Evil") Hill as a pair of middle-aged seaside lovers who make a belated attempt at rekindling their extinguished relationship, Gill ("A Cold Night's Death," "The Ultimate Warrior") Melle's rather inappropriate, but still funky moody jazz score, Steve ("Dead and Buried," "Donnie Darko") Poster's peculiarly fuzzy photography, and the lamest, phoniest, most pitifully unscary beast this side of the killer walking carpet in "The Creeping Terror" -- "Blood Beach" nonetheless still rates as a weirdly winning low-rent creature feature, mainly because a certain sweetly misguided, but very palpable and thus engaging enthusiasm permeates every single fabulously fumbling frame. It's this unusual synthesis of earnestness and ineptitude which ultimately makes this baby so endearing. And any picture which boasts a scene where a nasty would-be rapist gets gruesomely castrated by the rampaging monster will always get my vote.