PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Made for TV B movies are usually hit or miss. As for Sea Beast, this one swung and missed completely. Where do I begin with this film? Writers Neil Elman and Paul Ziller managed to combine elements of The Perfect Storm, Predator and Jaws to create this movie. You would think combining three good movies into one would be a good thing. Too bad it wasn’t.
Ziller not only co-wrote Sea Beast, he directed it as well. This movie tells the story of a down on his luck fishing captain named Will (Corin Nemec: Rottentail 2012) whose crew begins to disappear when they come back to port with an uninvited guest. As usual, the town drunk, Ben (Brent Stait: Final Destination 5 2011), believes Will when nobody else does, including the owner of the boat, Roy (Roman Podhora: Resident Evil: Apocalypse 2004). Will’s daughter, Carly (Miriam McDonald: Wolves 2014), her boyfriend, Danny (Daniel Wisler: Dark Reel 2008), and Carly’s friend, Erin (Christie Laing: Tucker and Dale vs Evil 2010), are going off on a boat ride where the uninvited guest makes its appearance… along with its family! Isn’t that just wonderful?
As with a lot of these made for TV sci-fi specials, where the CGI can range from good to about as special as a glass of water, the monsters in this movie fall somewhere in between. We get the actual Sea Beast, which does look menacing, and you got the little monsters which are probably a direct tribute to Tremors 2.
One has to wonder what goes into the process of movies like this with a budget lower than whale excrement. You would expect the acting to be top notch to make up for the budget, but when the writers focus more on attacking people rather than developing them, you end up with characters with all the personality of bathroom tile before they’re killed off. You take a good movie like Friday the 13th Part 4 where all the characters have different personality traits that either make you laugh, make you want to kill them yourself or hope to see them live. Unfortunately, most of these made for TV debacles don’t have that kind of development.
All in all, Sea Beast is NOT a complete waste of time. In fact, you could learn something from it, even if it’s only how not to make a movie, how not to develop a character or how to make a CGI monster that actually looks scary. It’s a mixed bag of a movie with some good elements and some bad elements, but definitely worth taking a look at. Grab a Rolling Rock, kick back, relax and check out Sea Beast.
