SeaBeast

Sea Beast (2008)

The movie opens on a fishing vessel in a storm, or at least what the guy doing the CGI thought it should look like. The crew is being tossed around as they try to bring in their nets. Everyone thinks that they lost a man overboard when a wave hits the boat, but the skipper realizes that a sort of invisible sea monster took him off the deck. If losing a member of his crew, and his catch isn’t bad enough the monster follows him back to port, eats his brother the sheriff and terrorizes his daughter! Toss in a bunch of other townsfolk getting gobbled up and dozens of baby monsters (boy can that fish lay a lot of eggs in a short amount of time!) for a monsters movie that could cause your head to explode if you think about it too much.

Really this movie has no logic to it at all. First you have a deep-sea amphibian that can live on the land, but hasn’t ever tried to before? Of course the science lady explains they need to lay their eggs on dry land so again how has no one ever seen one before? I mean no on says they are like dinosaurs freed from the polar ice caps or aliens newly arrived on Earth. So I don’t get it. Also how exactly did the little bugger lay hundreds of eggs that hatch into creatures almost half their mother’s size in what seems to be less than 24 hours? I think that these are all good questions that need to be immediately forgotten if you are going to enjoy Sea Beast. This is one of those movies that you just need to shut your brain off if you are going to enjoy at all. You just have to sit back and enjoy the CGI critters running to and fro gobbling up the locals until they are killed in an entirely silly and overly complicated manner.

The picture and sound are solid. I mean they obviously had some money and skill on the set when making this movie. That must have been where they spent the money they had set aside for a scriptwriter and special effects. From the beginning of the movie with the fishing boat struggling with the storm to the creatures themselves we get to see some of the worst CGI I’ve ever forced myself to watch. The creatures look horrible and their interactions with the live actors are bad as well. But as bad as the CGI is it still is far better than the few close-ups with some awful hand puppets!

So by now you should already know if you could have fun with a movie like this. After growing up watching bad “B” movies from the 50s and 60s I’ve trained myself to just go with the flow of this kind of movie. So in spite of the dumb story and the bad CGI this movie did work on a goofy level. While I can’t recommend a purchase it might be good for a few laughs as a rental. And honestly if a movie can provide some entertainment it has done it’s job.

2 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer