“Blood Beach” (1981)
Studio: Compass International Pictures
Starring: David Huffman, Marianna Hill, Burt Young, John Saxon
Directed by: Jeffrey Bloom
Rated: R
Running Time: 92 min.
Synopsis: People start disappearing on a California beach and the police and the community are trying to figure out who or what is making these people go away.
REVIEW
Chris Woods
A cool little horror gem from the 1980’s that takes being afraid to go to the beach after watching Jaws to another level. Their tag line for this film was, “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, you can’t get to it.”
The movie is about a beach where people start mysteriously disappearing when they walk across the sand. Law enforcement and people of the beach community want to figure out what’s beneath the ground. At first, a woman is sucked into the sand, but no one sees it. She’s reported missing and her daughter comes back to town to try and find her. The daughter’s ex-boyfriend who is head of the harbor patrol helps her out with the search. Then things start to get scary when they find the missing woman’s dog on the beach with its head missing. Police then believe there’s a maniac out there and still have no clue it is some creature under the sand. That all changes when a girl’s legs are almost chewed off during a busy day at the beach and the people can’t believe that some kind of monsters is deep below.
This film is a pretty good horror flick for the time. There are lots of creepy moments and some good suspense. Also the cast is pretty good as well, with genre favorite John Saxon and Burt Young (Paulie from the Rocky films) playing a wish cracking cop. Blood Beach is not that heavy with the gore, but has a couple of gruesome scenes. One that sticks out is a rapist who is preying on his next victim under the pier and is castrated by the creature when he’s rolling around in the sand trying to rape the girl. There’s also a cool part when one of the only survivors of the creature crawls out of manhole all messed up.
Towards the end you kind of see what the creature looks like, but there’s only a few good shots of it. It kind of looks like a big slug with razor sharp teeth. The scenes were kind of dark, but I did watch a bootleg couple of it and I’m sure it would of looked better if the picture was cleaned up. Also, the climax could have been a lot better, I thought it was rushed a bit, but the final moments of the film were pretty good.
Blood Beach is a film worth checking out and is still very entertaining. It’s one of those films like Jaws, where after you see it and you go to the beach you start to be very cautious on where you step.