Thursday, July 25, 2013

2010 Horror Fest: Blood Beach: 54 Out Of 100 Stars

I was just a wee Joey when the commercials for this movie scared the piss out of me. Released in 1981 in what I assume was a move to siphon off some of the Jaws hype, Blood Beach goes one step further than a Shark attacking people. In this sucker, the fucking beach is the killer. What's not to love?

So I'd pretty much forgotten those frightening commercials from my youth when I saw this title available for download and figured what the fuck

I'm excited right off the bat to find out that it stars Burt Young, Paulie from the Rocky movies, who has never not been awesome.

Something is sucking people down into the sand, and in the case of some people and things, biting parts of their anatomy off.

The leads are pretty faceless and totaly nameless. The dude is a Harbor Patrolemn who lives right on the beach and at one point in time was engaged to the daughter of the first lady who gets swallowed up. When Mom gets eaten by the sand, the daughter returns and old sparks reignite. This sort of went nowhere as a storyline and only served up some cheesy 80's music montages as they ate dinner and rekindled old flames.

I'm getting off track. Assigned to the case are two cops. A middle aged black sage and Uncle Paulie, who plays a cop named Royko. Paulie is playing a tough guy from Chicago who always has a hard edged take on everything he thinks is soft here in California. I'm fairly certain this is a sendup of columnist Mike Royko as all Paulie does all movie is deliver working class ruffian logic, and a devilshly melancholy attitude on everyone and every thing that's gone missing.

Their Captain is played by the dad from the original Nightmare series and he's all sorts of the bomb. He has 4 or 5 scenes that are pretty much monologues and he knocks em all out of the park.

Everything involving the cops works. All three of them take average material and knock it out of the park. The movie is legit fun to watch when they're on screen.

It's not so fun when it focuses on the dandy leads. Dude running around in shorts all the time with his sunbleached hair and his abs and shit. He's also pretty nondescript.

The kills and the monster are a bit of a letdown although watching some people be sucked in by sand was cool.

The conclussion of the film is pretty silly when a scientist gets shoehorned into the script and comes up with crazy theories and shit.

There are some great 80's moments like the night Harbor Patrol guard and his girlfriend who love to sing to each other. Theres even a bar scene where he rocks out on Keytair and then they sing a duet. Then a rape scene under the peer where the two participants do the crab at each other for about a minute is also entertaining.

So yeah, I made it all the way through, wasn't sure it'd be even that good. I'm guessing that at the time this was pretty ok, and it does have replay value just for the cops, so i'll reccomend it if you can find it.

Surf on in to Blood Beach, it just might suck you in.

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