Blood Beach (1980)
4/10
Flower Power at the Beach of Blood
20 February 2010
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.
11 out of 15 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

Recently Viewed