Blood Beach (1980)

The early ’80s had been a boom period for cheap horror movies, and Blood Beach arrived when the trend was on a downswing, having suffered from total, wall to wall, week to week saturation. I recall a trip to New York City at the end of 1980, and there were around a dozen horror films on release, and I remember feeling like a kid in a candy store. Maniac, Motel Hell, Terror Train, Mother’s Day, He Knows You’re Alone, Humanoids from the Deep were just some of the titles playing the week I visited; Christmas had arrived early! A movie that I first noticed playing on Tremont Street in Boston at a fleapit theatre signalled the starting point of the cities notorious “combat zone”, known less for combat as it was for the sleazy sex trade.

The Horror bubble was soon to burst as films became a re-tread of each other, and the whole masked slasher thing that had been so exhilarating a couple of years ago in Halloween was now done to death and beyond. As audiences grew bored of the same old thing, a severe stagnation had set in until Wes Craven’s ace Nightmare on Elm Street rejuvenated the entire genre. Until then, there was a conveyor belt of cheap, largely forgettable horror fodder churned out week after week with peanuts as box office compared to the spectacular heady days of Halloween and Friday the 13th.

Blood Beach was a film with zero-star quality but a premise and tagline that raised plenty of eyebrows and induced many a chuckle among the rather bizarre entries into the horror market. “Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water, you can’t make it across the beach!” which plays on the tag Jaws 2 from a couple of summers ago.

Blood Beach is set at a bleak, down-market seaside resort town somewhere near Los Angeles that has seen better days and has fallen into a dilapidated state where the rot well and truly set in with hardly a tourist in sight.

Nonetheless, in this slum version of Amity, things are not as they seem as quite suddenly, in broad daylight, a lady walking her dog is suddenly sucked into the sand by some unseen force. Our hero, a harbour patrol officer, was out for a swim but heard Aunt Ruthie scream as she got sucked into the earth, but alas, he didn’t see anything. Ruthie’s daughter, the harbour patrol guy’s ex-flame, arrives from the city to comprehend what could have happened to her mother. Soon, the mourning dog is taken out of his misery as the earth suddenly decapitates him in the most gruesome manner. Kat (Mariana Hill) slowly rekindles her romance with her ex-boyfriend. At the same time, the police remain stumped as more and more people fall prey to the strange underground evil force that is swallowing up the populace at an alarming rate. The dog loses his head, a young beauty attacked as her friends make sandcastles around her, and a sleazy man loses his genitalia. In contrast, others swallowed whole as the body count reaches epidemic proportions. The police are clueless as the insidious threat of this ghastly unseen evil exposes them as being desperate and helpless in equal measure.

Wandering bag ladies are never to be taken lightly in horror movies, and in Blood Beach, we have Trolley Lady representing the Crazy Ralph’s of the world deftly steering her shopping cart trolley while warning of impending doom. Still, of course, nobody takes any notice of her.

Theories are formed about some amphibious creature that has taken up residence under the damp, dark sandy environment of the Beach and is nourishing itself on human sunbathers and might one day decide to emerge from below to reveal itself. The police ridicule the theory as mumbo jumbo yet cannot stop or explain the growing body count.

One of the unlikely reasons for a major attraction to this movie right from the onset was the presence of Mariana Hill as the lead actor. Most people will react with “Mariana Who?” but for us, she was a household favourite for years before Blood Beach appeared. Ms. Hill had already entranced us as Cleo Patrick, King (Victor Buono) Tut’s Muse from the classic 60s Batman series, and we were in awe of her in that particular incarnation. The only other movie we have seen her having a significant role in was the quite insane “The Baby”, but as Miss Cleo Patrick, she gained our allegiance for life. Here she plays a relatively more sedate role as Kat, daughter of the first victim of the Beach and heartthrob of town hunk, the patrol officer.

However, despite that, it’s a mildly entertaining b movie hokum that just about manages to keep the viewer engaged for its duration in the hope of a spectacularly fabulous monster mayhem climax. Still, sadly in this movie, a finish doesn’t materialize at all. Even King Tut’s muse Cleo Patrick can’t alleviate the dull pedestrian nature of this film. Everything is forgettable other than the superb poster and its perfect tagline! The film meanders in a slack manner and cannot create any tension leading to the tame climax. You hardly see anything resembling a subterranean monster of any kind, resulting in a feeling of being slightly fleeced along the way.

Beware of Horror movies with brilliant posters because that is often the only good thing about them!