Blood Beach (1980)
- Written and directed by Jeffrey Bloom, but I think I saw his name go by six times in the two minute opening credits sequence. He would later go on to do one of the worst films I have ever seen in the theater, 1987’s “Flower in the Attic” – an adaptation of the VC Andrews mystery thriller novel of the same name. His last directing credit was in 1991, so I feel like he can’t hurt us any more.
- Awful, relentlessly boring and lacking anything even remotely resembling suspense, “Blood Beach” hangs its hat on a tagline that idiotically mocks Jaws 2’s own tagline. Whereas the sequel to one of the greatest adventure thrillers of all time was “Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water,” “Blood Beach” actually has star John Saxon say its own tagline in the movie: “ust when you thought it was safe to go back into the water… you can’t get to it.” Saxon delivers this like his life depends on it, but the lead character guy seems hilariously unimpressed.
- So what’s it about? A beach monster eats people and then the police, which includes an intolerably awful Bert Young – who seems to be ad-libbing his way through everything – pontificate and dick around while a harbor patrolman, named Harry, tries to rekindle a romance with his ex, whose mom was eaten in the first scene. Oh and his current girlfriend is eaten too, clearing the way for the great rekindling which, inexplicably includes some kind of live singing number. It’s all just positively awful and you’re the worst person in the world for assigning me this pile of dog-shit.
- Harry the short patrolman is played by actor David Huffman, and honestly the guy changes tone so much from scene to scene that, coupled with the awful cinematography and sound, made me really unsure if he was even the same character. Sadly, there’s a tragic backstory about Huffman as he died in 1985 at 39 years-old after being stabbed in a botched robbery attempt. The murderer was sentenced to 26 years in prison in 1986. Sad that he wasn’t given more time to bury this damn thing on his resume with more, better work as he seemed destined to do more.
- Gotta love that 4:3 aspect ratio shot on bleached out Kodachrome. Has to be 16mm
- This is the first theatrical film cinematographer Steven Poster shot, and I’m shocked the guy went on to do anything else as the lighting and camera were a mess. If this movie was any darker it’d be the Game of Thrones Battle of Winterfell. Amazingly, this guy – who also did Big-Top Pee Wee and Rocky V – would become Richard Kelly’s go-to director of photography as Poster did “Donnie Darko,” “Southland Tales” and “The Box!”
- Seems like the Blood Beach monster was doing tapas – first it goes big with a whole lady, then it tears a small dog’s head off, next it nibbles on the legs of a young woman, then it eats another whole person, but then it caps that off by eating a rapist’s weiner. Finally, he chows on two dudes for big finish, one of whom has a positively insane hairdo. Hoagy’s hair – he’s the deputy harbor patrolman – is a thing of beauty.
- I think David Lynch saw this and took some his narrative carelessness from it. Like, this movie doesn’t care at all about its characters or who even is the lead character. It seems it’s supposed to be Harry, the shore patrolman, but it meanders into a police procedural and after a while you feel like you’re in another movie, kind of like you do with Lynch’s Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive. Also, there’s this vagrant woman who is seriously giving vibes of that scary hobo in Mulholland Drive. Yeah, you know the one. Did Lynch see Blood Beach in 1981 and internalize it, spitting out movies that echo it’s weirdness in ’97 and ’99? Maybe that’s how long you need for garbage to ferment into fine wine? Not going to lie, the very first shot of the thing also made me thing of Lynch’s sand worm’s in his ’84 version of Dune.
I got the “extended and uncut” Version off Plex and it’s only 86 minutes long. According to IMDB, it’s suppose to be 92 minutes long?
Burt Young is in it?! Right before his insane performance in Amityville 2!
Two minute credit sequence and I saw Jeffrey Bloom’s name like six times.
Ready to have the yippy dog get munched by a sand dune.
So the sand sort of, like, puckers and drags people under? Seems vaguely buttholish? Is this the asshole cut of a movie we have been clamoring for?
Earnest beat cop versus jaded detectives. THE DRAMA
Christ, this goddamn dog is back.
Oh boy, an estranged relationship!
I’m having a horrific time understanding the characters’ dialog.
Jesus, the image is almost as bad as the sound!
I feel like this undressing sequence intercut with dog death may be the longest scene in cinema history.
Christ what is the lighting doing in the bedroom. They look like they’re sexing in the early morning and it’s intercut with a decapitated dog.
Burt Young mumbling in poorly-recorded location sound. Fucking horrible.
There’s no goddamn sense in any of what is happening or when things happen.
Lead character is a harbor patrolman named Harry.
Jesus, a giant rubber green hand! Ohs nos!
John Saxon ONCE AGAIN playing a cop. The dialogue he is forced to say here is insanely asinine.
The exploration effort by the police to find this thing looks like it required an actual budget!
- The black cop doesn’t even know how to react to Burt Young or his lines when Young starts shouting about the Nazi Party.
The vagrant lady character reminds me of that creepy hobo from Mulholland Drive. Was Lynch a Blood Beach fan?!?
The black cat jump scare! Holy shit!
The couple that sings together gets eaten by a beach together
- Why is this girl not just heading home? Why is she heading down to the beach with her bike?! She walks way the fuck out of her way to see what a bird was doing… then gets assaulted and shows some boob until the rapist is swallowed by a bloody beach asshole.
I don’t think anyone knows how to deal with Burt Young.
“Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water… you can’t get to it.” Saxon delivers this like his life depends on it, but the lead character guy seems hilariously unimpressed. Weird play on the Jaws 2 tagline and an indicator of just how unserious this entire endeavor is.
Moist dark places. That’s where the creature lives according to the investigating scientist.
I’m losing track of characters. Marie is the patrolman’s air attendant girlfriend, but he is stuck on his ex whose mom died.
Day scenes do not match the opposite angle day scenes. Time means nothing!
- There is a scene where a guy seasons and oils a broken off piece of a baguette and then takes a bite. And then… nothing. Next scene. I guess this is because he was waiting for his air attendant girlfriend who was busy getting eaten by the beach outside.
Blonde eaten by the sand looks marginally inconvenienced
And then we get subterranean nudie shots.
The lead actor is so horrifically off tone from scene to scene.
This movie feels interminably long.
This guys work outfit and commute are a vibe. Just throw on my orange vest, blue skivvies and gooooo.
A hat blows off his girlfriend’s head, but then magically stays on the goddamn beach until the following morning so it can be found.
- How is that eye not coated completely with sand? It’s an exposed eyeball. I go to the beach with my eyes IN my head and end up with enough sand blown in my eyes to build a castle. If there was an eye buried in sand, it would NEVER be clean again.
Harbor patrolman Harry is losing his shit completely!! Completely irrational emotional reaction given what we have seen from the guy thus far!
This movie feels like one of those safety training videos they’d show before you start a job, only the acting is worse and it’s even more boring.
People are just wandering through this film without destinations. Or they have destinations but then randomly abandon them.
The guy using the metal detector – maybe one of the worst reaction shots of all time.
What the fuck is this duet scene?! Who are these people.
Oh my god, this movie – from a sloppy 1970’s candlelight dinner to these two smooching in bed.
The interview segment with Burt Young and the wife is so laughably detailed. And so fucking long. It feels like initial comedy.
Then a newscast reporter in a painfully long and pointless segment.
Now John Saxon soliloquies in the station again. Every segment is intolerably paced.
- Pointless scenes, zero suspense, horrid technical quality, ludicrously rambling performances that are so uneven from one scene to the next that you’re not sure who the characters are. Like, it’s physically challenging to tell from scene to scene who is who!
I like how this blood beach monster is only killing people who are close to the lead character of the movie.
They recycle this one piece of music as much as Disney recycled John Barry’s main theme in “The Black Hole…” and this sounds similar.
I think this scene between Harry and the black cop is part of the extended cut and it looks like it was pulled off VHS. And it’s boring and dumb and pointless. Fuck, this is painful.
When people watch SyFy movie now -/
The extended cut appears to be poorly edited in unused footage that doesn’t actually cut in cleanly with the original film footage.
Did they just take away people parts in Hefty cinch sacks from under the boardwalk? Because wow.
- 16 bodies, 3 identified. How the fuck did it take this long for people to catch on? Why not ask the homeless lady what’s up as SHE’S ALWAYS WATCHING.
The scientist and Burt Young having a philosophical discussion, which is really just the scientist SLOWLY pontificating and Burt Young looking like he smells a fart.
Real men Don’t believe in Monsters – John Saxon. Black cop “No, they don’t.”
- The scenes are like a mix and match of the cop characters speaking to each other about various nonsense, but in a way to suggest the screenwriter was just going through the mathematical combinations so each character shares screen time with another. Pointless.
BLOW IT UP. That’s the fucking plan? They don’t see it in its lair, so they blow up the lair and then decided all is better?! THE FUCK?
The Vulcan neck pinch the girl does on the boy making out with her at the end! How romantix!
- There’s actually a good if predictable shot at the end with a little boy named Sean that disappears and it’s a well-populated beach scene with a terrific dolly shot that shows the mom looking throughout the beach. Almost plays like it could have been in Jaws were Spielberg not talented.
- The final scene plays out like it’s a content to see which shot is the best to end the movie with. Each and with sand caving into a small hole to suggest IT’S SEQUEL TIME BABY.
Bottom Five Beach Scenes:
My approach: I wanted to stay away from war movies, as that was the easiest route. So no “Saving Private Ryan,” or “Dunkirk,” although those would 100% be more than acceptable answers and would definitely be beach scenes NO ONE wants any part of. Ditto the “Charlie Don’t Surf” scene in “Apocalypse Now.” So, instead what I did is take five things I don’t like about going to the beach and then finding movies that best represent each one.
5.) From Here to Eternity (1953)
dr. Fred Zinneman
It was Burt Lancaster’s idea to make out with Deborah Kerr while lying down in the surf instead of how it was written in the screenplay with them standing. The adulterous characters they play were written into a far more racy beach scene in the book upon which the film was based, but the censor board would never allow for such things on film back in 1953 when it was released. In fact, even havin9g them entangled while lying on the beach was strong stuff – and it stands today; considered one of the most romantic moments in all of cinema history because everyone knows what I do: making out on a beach – specifically with waves crashing over you – is fucking awful. Sand goes EVERYWHERE, and I’m talking EVERYWHERE. That was the point of the scene, of course. That these two lovebirds were so INTO one another that they didn’t even mind sand going up where the sun don’t shine. But for me, yeah, no. Maybe it’s just that I have a cold, dead heart, but I’ve never been into another person enough to passionately make out while ocean blasts my nethers with saltwater and sand. And for that reason, I’ve somehow worked an absolute classic scene into my bottom five.
4.) One Crazy Summer
dir. Savage Steve Holland
While the movie is mostly about the misadventures of an artist ironically named Hoops – because he’s bad at basketball – who is played by John Cusack, and his budding affections for Demi Moore’s Cassandra, a singer-songwriter, One Crazy Summer also boasts a great ensemble cast including 80’s staples Curtis Armstrong and Bobcat Goldthwait as Hoops’s eccentric friends. Among these is Joel Murray, yet another Bill Murray sibling who attempted to grab bit of his brother’s limelight and, at best, ended up with a tiny bit of zest. And maybe the reason he ended up opening a restaurant called “Caddyshack” with his brothers instead of landing bigger acting gigs is due to the horror his character, George Calamari, is subjected to during a beach scene in One Crazy Summer. The scene begins with George inexplicably buried up to his neck in sand while hanging out with the aforementioned friend-group. Asking for some shade, one of these helpful fellows places a beach chair over his head… and then walks away to console Cusak’s lovestruck Hoops. While unattended, a very large person – it was the 80’s, so obesity was 100% played for laughs – sits on the chair while wearing headphones, which means the sitter’s ass was mere inches away from George. The gag goes on for a while, with the large beach-goer devouring a bagful of various foods before settling on… chili. Before we know it, EMS arrives and argues about who’s going to give George mouth-to-mouth. It’s a dumb scene in an otherwise funny movie, but what’s most crazy about it is that this once again happens to George later in the film, meaning it’s an actual subplot. And what I took away from it was 1 – don’t ever get buried at the beach and 2 – private beaches are where it’s at because other people suck.
3.) Summer Rental (1985)
dir. Carl Reiner
1985’s “Summer Rental” is a dumb comedy that pretty much nails all 80’s tropes in a reasonably entertaining way. John Candy plays a stressed-out family man who brings his wife and three children to a dilapidated beach shack during peak season and experiences all the horrors one would expect including boating accidents, annoyingly crowded beaches and, of course, the kind of sunburn that leaves one looking like a well-boiled lobster. And it’s because of that sunburn, which Candy’s character gets RIGHT at the beginning of the film, that Summer Rental lands on my bottom five beach scenes. I’ll admit, I love this movie – I was a big John Candy fan – and matching him up with Richard Crenna as a douchey Real Estate mogul and yachtsman and Rip Torn as a “pirate” named Scully was genius, not to mention The Goonies’ Kerri Greene in an early role, and you’ve got a slice of 80’s comedy heaven that ends, of course, with a regatta pitting the good guys versus the bad guys after a glorious montage sequence set to Jimmy Buffet’s “Turning Around.”
2.) The Paperboy (2012)
dir. Lee Daniels
This is a wild, weird, wacky movie and I’m not sure anyone involved quite understood what they were doing with. It also has a beach scene that takes two of my biggest beach fears – or fears in general – and combines them. About a third of the way into the movie, Zac Efron’s character Jack, who has fallen in love with Charlotte, a sexual adventurous woman played by Nicole Kidman, storms off toward the beach after Charlotte mocks his lust for her. While in the water, he’s repeatedly stung by Jellyfish and nearly drowns, just barely pulling himself back to the surf when he’s spotted by a few sunbathing girls. The girls quickly assess that he’s having an allergic reaction to the jellyfish sting, and one of them pulls her bathing suit bottom off an attempts to urinate on him because she’s heard that’s the quickest way to cleanse the wounds. Kidman’s character then runs over and chases the girls away so she can pee on him instead and, thus, further control him. I mean, do I even need to say anything more? Jellyfish stings and Nicole Kidman peeing on the wound? Does it get worse? I mean, unless you’re into that kind of thing. But… yeah, no. This thing lands firmly at my number two.
1.) Deep Impact
dir. Mimi Leder
Tia Leone and Maximillian Schell as father and daughter, patch up their various traumas while standing on a beach near the end of this Mimi Leder-directed end-of-the-world movie from 1998. The pair discuss and reconcile her blaming him for her mother’s death and him… dropping her on her head when she was a baby. And then… BOOM, the half of the meteor heading for Earth that Robert Duvall and his fellow astronauts couldn’t stop slams into the Atlantic Ocean and Tia and dear-old-dad get in one last hug before getting positively POUNDED out of existence by arguably the biggest tidal wave in cinema history. This is that OTHER meteor movie that came out in ’98, the one with a pre-Lord of the Rings Elija Wood and Morgan Freeman as President of the United States, a role he was positively born to play and would take up again in those ridiculous “… Has Fallen” movies starring Gerard Butler.