BLOOD BEACH (1980)

BLOOD BEACH (1980)

Tagline: The five people believed to have drowned here never even made it past the sand!

(Horror, Sci-Fi, Paulie) [R]

Last but not least, lovely blonde sixteen-year-old girl - from Beverly Hills, no less, and slumming, I presume - suffered massive damage to both her once-pretty legs, may be crippled for life, and her mind blown halfway to the moon, simply because she was foolish enough to lie down on this particular beach.

In this one, something is sucking people underneath the sand of a California beach and no one seems to have any answers. As the cops search for clues and funding, more and more people are disappearing. Meanwhile, Harry Caulder and Catherine Hutton are in the area after re-igniting an old flame and know the beaches pretty well. So they decide to help by searching some old building basements that they feel may house something more than cobwebs.  

First off the most glaring thing about this movie is that Burt Young (who plays Sgt. Royko) must have just been told to straight up play “Paulie” from the ROCKY series. Burt isn’t even trying to play a different character here. He has all the mannerisms, attitude, and moxie of “Paulie” and it’s actually pretty fantastic. We also get a gloriously unfazed John Saxon (A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET) as Capt. Pearson and he’s every bit as obnoxious as Sgt. Royko. 

This is another slow burn JAWS type film only we don’t have a shark; we have a creature in the sand. I don’t want to give away too much if you haven’t seen this, but basically, we are not going to see this creature at all till the very end of the movie. I saw a pretty terrible copy of this movie so for me, I barely saw him even when they were trying to show him. 

Outside of the actors I have already mentioned we also get Marianna Hill who was most famous for THE GODFATHER PART II but does a solid job in this. She had one of those interesting careers where she acted from 1960 through 1988 very steadily, then took a 17-year break and then did one more movie and that was it. David Huffman does a pretty good job as the lead male Harry. David had a pretty solid career but the highlight was probably this movie or FIREFOX. 

BLOOD BEACH does have a bit of a cult following and the artwork for the poster and VHS is pretty iconic. We do get a decent score and some decent cinematography, but overall this storyline just drags on and on and even Burt Young and John Saxon being awesome can’t really fix it. There is a bit of a romantic storyline, but it’s overshadowed by police politics and police doing paperwork, and police getting yelled at by Capt. Pearson. The actual monster is almost a side plot and we don’t get a ton of fake blood and goofy-looking body parts or any of that. 

With a better script, this could have been interesting, but instead, it’s a dull film that I found myself checking in and out of like an episode of “Rick and Morty” where the plot is so stupid life-sucking you don’t even care what happens, you just want to see the credits roll.  I wish I liked this one better, but if you are going to be doing a serious movie you have to give us something more to go on to keep the story going than the occasional person screaming being sucked into the sand, and two former lovers hitting it off again over a dead relative.

Ultimately this is a 2 out of 7 for me. It’s definitely not a movie I would watch again even for these two great actors. 

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