Blood Beach (1980)
Directed by Jeffrey Bloom
Jaws ripoffs, they were EVERYWHERE back in the day. Blood Beach is one of those, I mean you watch 10 minutes of it and you can see it, but at least it had a twist. What if the danger wasn’t in the water, but on the beach itself?! Well time to fire up the old betamax VCR and give it a watch.
Blood Beach is about a beach town that has numerous missing people cases. Something in the sand is killing people off, and the authorities have to stop it before it consumes us all! The story isn’t anything new, hell like I said it is a ripoff of Jaws, but technically Tremors is a rip off of both of these, so yeah…Anyway, John Saxon plays a cop, shocker…I know and Burt Young plays a grizzled borderline alcoholic, again shocker…I know. They’re always nice to see in movies and you can expect a solid performance from both.
The effects are decent, you don’t really see the monster until the end. People seem to sink down into holes in the beach and it is effective and scary, so I’ll give them that. This is a good example of a low budget movie knowing how to effectively work around the lack of budget. Keep the monster a mystery until the end and have a good payoff. This is definitely an above average creature feature.
The acting is fairly solid and the characters are decent. No one is winning an oscar for this but who cares, it is entertaining! If you enjoy cheap creature features of the 80s, then you’ll likely enjoy Blood Beach, also the poster is awesome, can’t forget about that! I give Blood Beach a B.
