SEA BEAST

Well, WHAT A DELIGHT THIS ONE WAS!

This 2008 release, directed by Paul Ziller and starring Corin Nemec, is EXACTLY WHAT YOU GET when you throw The Perfect Storm, Jurassic Park, The Relic, Predator, Humanoids From The Deep, The Horror Of Party Beach, Leviathan and Jaws into the blender.  Press "pulverize" and voila!  Leaping lizards from the deep have hitched a ride to shore on the hull of a fishing boat and are putting the munch on squealing teenagers!  WILL ANYONE SURVIVE?

CLIFFIE'S NOTES ON THIS TERRIFYING FEATURE:

>>  One of my "secret shoppers" -- a half-Hake who can still pass as human -- found this in the Fine Films section at Aco Hardware.  'Nuff said.  Wait, you want to know more?  OK, you asked for it...

>>  You will recognize characters, and famous film moments, from all of the movies I listed above.  Two examples: "Ben," a drunken laughingstock turned hero, is recognizably the result of throwing Ben Gardner and Captain Quint from Jaws into a food processor.  Barb, the harbormaster, is clearly a mutant hybrid of Linda Greenlaw and Ethel Shatford from The Perfect Storm.  The whole movie goes like that.

>>  All the REALLY important characters in this picture are human teenyboppers played by human twentysomethings.  They sneak off to places they shouldn't go, and do things they shouldn't do, until consumed by monsters.  (Maybe I should add Friday the 13th to the list of film  ripoffs homages.)  The piercing, girly squeals of Miriam McDonald, who kills more of the creatures with her astounding knife-throwing skills than anyone else in this picture, is so obnoxious that she made me quite sorry to see her cast in the Final Girl role.

>> Ah, the acting.  How do I describe this?  Does anyone but me remember the nuns' choir as Whoopi Goldberg first finds it in Sister Act?  The nuns all sing.  Some of them sing wonderfully.  They all sing the same music.  But none of them sing TOGETHER.  This movie is like that.  Sea Beast left me with the impression that each actor has a separate director, and each of those directors has a separate idea of how they want the scenes to work.  The whole movie goes like that.

>> I just want to make a quick note about the finances of the fishing-boat captain in this story.  He's supposedly facing the specter of losing his boat and his income, but he lives in a really beautiful place by the ocean filled with those Martha Stewart touches I associate with extra spending money.  Also, a big chunk of the story takes place at his island "cabin," which is even fancier than the main house.  I kind of wonder who fixed the place up with the nice drapes and paintings and stuff.  Is this really how the single dad of a teenaged girl, who captains a small commerical fishing boat, gets by?  SIGN ME UP.  By the way, what kind of commerical fisherman even OWNS a getaway fishing cabin, let alone a villa like this one?

>>  Ah, the monsters!  There is NOTHING not to like about them.  They combine features of the menaces from all the films I listed above.  And, yes, with the exception of a single papier-mache puppet that made my heart sing, every one of them was a crappy-looking computer-generated cartoon.  Each monster was the size of a bear (or at least a bearcub), quadrupedal with great big claws on each hand and foot, a shooting tongue like unto a chameleon's, and teeth that go from here to there.  What I like best is the fact that they come from deep in the ocean and have never been seen on land before, but the  minute they arrive they are able to breathe air and leap from treetop to treetop with no sign of land-weakness, clumsiness or oxygen deprivation.  What are they?  A kid who takes a blurry camera-phone shot of one as it bears down on him decides it's an Anglerfish.  Exposition Girl/Lovely Blonde Scientist independently comes to the same conclusion.  Look at the photo.  DOES THAT LOOK LIKE AN ANGLERFISH TO YOU?

>> I have to save all my praise for Corin Nemec, who not only plays the lead and saves the day, but who gets through the entire story without cracking up AND without clotheslining either of the female leads. Mirian McDonald, who plays his daughter, I've already described.  Camille Sullivan, who plays Exposition Girl/Lovely Blonde Scientist, does nothing in this story but mouth unhelpful polysyllables that get the plucky fishing villagers no further -- they would have taken then same steps to defeat the menace if this woman had never been born.  What the skipper could be thinking about at the end of the movie when he decides to replace his monster-eaten crew with THOSE two is beyond me.  But I'll say this for him.  He faces down the leaping lizards with nothing but a compressed-air tank and a lit cigarillo, and he does it with a straight face.  Now, I don't want to suggest anything untoward about Corin Nemec here, but I feel he DID NOTHING BUT HELP US in agreeing to make this picture.  Anyone who can face down a laughable menace like this one with a straight face is ONLY HELPING OUR CAUSE by getting credulous Naked Apes all worked up about THOSE idiotic creatures...while WE are buying the DVD at Aco Hardware with nobody the wiser.