Okay, first things first, this movie is a product of "Sir Run Run Shaw Productions". Out of an utterly perverse curiosity of who or what a “Sir Run Run Shaw” is supposed to be, I took the bold step of doing an internet search. Low and behold, there is indeed an actual Sir Run Run Shaw! After scanning through his Wikipedia page, I dare say that he’s more interesting than the movie he’s executive produced here for us today. Though there is no image of him posted on the page, I’d like to of him as a 100 year old cross between Reverend Run from Run DMC and Pai Mai from Kill Bill Vol. 2, only wearing one of those jousting helmets with the big colorful plumage… you know, because he’s been knighted and everything… I think you’ll agree that it’s a hilarious thing to imagine.

Second things second, our opening credits sequence looks like somebody gave a beach drunk a camera and told him to wander around the boardwalk. The decidedly cheesy music seems to set us up for something nice to end the credits with, building to a shocking and terrifying... nothing. Yay. Way to start yourself off movie.

It's just another sunny morning on one of California's many beaches. An old lady walks her dog as her neighbor/friend/former would-be son-in-law and local harbor patrolman Harry goes for his morning dip in the briny deeps of the Pacific Coast. Not long after setting foot on the sands, our senior citizen is sucked under the sand by an unseen force! What type of sinister creature could do such a thing? Did she simply come across one of those patches of quicksand that South American terrorists were known for planting on our freedom loving beaches?! Whatever the case, Harry manages to hear her cries but sees none of it, despite being less than 100 yards away. One person who does witness the occurance is a local bag lady, looking down on the world from the top floor of an abandoned Merry Go Round facility. Is there something she knows about all this? Why didn't she try to help? Why doesn't she go to the police to tell them what she saw? Don't rack your brain over it too hard, much like the rest of this movie the bag lady's entire role in the movie is limited to the equivilant of the crazy old guy in the Friday the 13th movies that promises doom to the sexy teens and carries around diembodied sheep eyes he finds in the dumpster behind the butcher shop... only extended out over a long and needlessly painful period of time to fill space... and without the fun of the severed sheep eyes.

With the disappearance of the old broad, her daughter Cathy (the former fiancee to Harry) is called in from San Francisco to take care of her mom's newly orphaned pooch... who gets it's head bitten off by whatever it is that's living under the beach across the street from her former beau's abode... I just like the way that rolls of the tongue, "beau's abode"... Anyway, for those who think Harry and Cathy are going to jump right back under the sheets together, the hairiest chested member of the harbor patrol has a new piece of poon to throw his thinly veiled innuendos at. She's a blond stewardess or something who takes ten minutes to shed her clothes and undo her hair before romping into the sack. Sadly, I'd probably wind up white washing (or rather off-white washing...) the sheets before she even got into the bed...

Though some would be quick to chalk up Cathy's dog's death to a severe case of Missing Head Syndrome (there's a lot of that going around lately), the coroner who examines it chalks the cause of death up to an attack on the pooch by a big crazy lunatic with really long fingernails and, as Randall Graves likes to refer to it, "retard strength". Meanwhile, police Sgt. Royko (Rocky’s Burt Young doing his best Harvey Bullock impression for all you Batman geeks out there… we can smell our own), who's covering the case with his much more cooth and distinguished partner Lt. Piantadosi (played by Otis Young, who’s one of those guys you swear is somebody else until you look at his Internet Movie Database profile and realize you’re wrong…). Royko, proves himself to be the complete and uncaring ass that his status as a former Chicago cop brings with it by making flippant remarks about Cathy's corpsed up pup, to which Piantadosi responds by telling him to "go wait in the car" in probably the most satisfying 3 seconds of the movie. Meanwhile, some ditz from Beverly Hills gets her legs de-skinned in broad daylight when her buddies bury her under a very familiar patch of sand...

Of course the mauled girl comes from an affluent family, so her rich Beverly Hills parents press their fat green weight on the mayor, who in turn (as movie mayors are oft to do) leans on the balls of police Captain Pearson (John Saxon!). As such, Pearson orders some heavy construction on the beach to find out what happened to the girl and despite all the earth moving equipment brought in, not a thing is found… and the beach is left open so people can continue using it… wha!?

Also following the young lady’s mauling, a local news reporter heads to the self same jumbo litter box to ask the question we’re all thinking: why the fuck are there still people going to this beach?! Almost every movie gives us a scene where one character or another speaks the movie’s title to establish just how said title came to be. Blood Beach’s title dropping moment comes in the form of this very scene. That’s right, we’re asked to sit through a long boring scene of witless teen banter all so it can lead up to one of the sunning tit monkeys to make the passing comment of calling their hangout “Blood Beach”… I’d let it go if it weren’t for the fact that the movie’s littered with many more such pointless, time wasting segments! Elsewhere, in an equally senseless moment, we find Cathy walking toward an open window to investigate a noise and getting the classic “fake scare” of a black cat leaping through said window… only I’d probably shit myself too, since this particular housecat ROARS LIKE A FUCKING PANTHER… and the saints come marching in… all over my brain.

The rest of the film reminds me of that episode of “The Simpsons” where Moe the bartender recalls his early career as a childhood actor in the “Little Rascals” shorts. As “Smelly”, Moe’s character’s gimmick was that in each skit he would look into the tailpipe of a car and get a face full of soot. The challenge to the writers of said skits were to figure out a reason for Smelly to stick his face in said tailpipe to get that face full of soot in each short despite the fact that you’d think the Smellmeister would figure out eventually not to look into that damn tailpipe. That’s all I could think about while watching the rest of this movie: the writers sitting across a table from each other, trying to figure out ways to get people onto the beach despite the recent string of deaths and mutilations so that whatever it is making the people disappear could continue to do so, so as to keep the audience interested.

So, what “tailpipe gags” did the writers of Blood Beach manage to come up with? Here we go: a woman investigates what appears to be an injured seagull flopping around the boardwalk, only to be attacked by a would be rapist who then gets his man parts chewed off before help can arrive. The girl walks away relatively unscathed with the exception of nearly being raped and witnessing a man mutilated in front of her. Harry’s stewardess girlfriend is also eaten when a stiff breeze blows her floppy hat onto the sand and she decides to chase after it, ending predictably and with none of the neighbors witnessing it or hearing her desperate pleas for assistance. Harry figures she’s just stood him up… until he finds her car still parked in his driveway the next morning and sees her hat still sitting on the sand… which I find funny since the wind just wouldn’t stop blowing when the hat was taken off the woman’s head the night before, but has apparently completely died since… A douche bag combs the beach with a metal detector (probably hoping to stumble upon one of those $3000 lost diamond rings that equally douche baggy guys always seem to find in the commercials for said metal detectors) only to, you guessed it, be eaten by the unseen killer… that apparently comes above the surface for this particular attack as the man looks on in horror without being sucked into the sand as all previous victims had been. For our final “tailpipe gag”, Harry’s harbor patrol partner drives out onto the sand in pursuit of the local bag lady to protect her from the invisible killer and, in a weak bit of irony, winds up eaten himself. Nope, didn’t see that coming from the horizon like Godzilla humping the side of the Sears Tower.

Eventually, after all the pointless crap and random beach attacks are finally done, Cathy stumbles upon the lair of the culprit, located in the basement of the Merry Go Round building I mentioned waaaaaay up near the top of the review, where she's bathed in dismembered body parts that spill from the ceiling. The cops set up surveillance equipment to see what their mystery killer looks like and sure enough some big phallic venus flytrap (which I guess youcoul call a "penis flytrap" in this case) appears before being promptly blown all to shit by the overzealous Royko, whose insistence on ignoring the warnings of a professor on biological evolution about the unknown factors such an unstudied creature could present leads to an end credits finale that threatens us with the possibility of a sequel as various beach-goers are suddenly greated by shifting patches of sand... Then again, it's been over a quarter of a century since, so I think we're officially safe by this point.

A concept that should've made for some campy matinee horror sci-fi fun can't even pull that off, as we get dropkicked in the gonads over and over again with so many unnecessary scenes of characters bullshitting about absolutely nothing! I mentioned a few such scenes throughout my review, but strap yourselves in for the biggest offender of the entire flick when the wife of the asshat with the metal detector files a missing persons report for her "man" (and I use the term loosely) with Royko. The scene lasts several minutes as she describes what the guy was wearing when he left the house in nerve racking detail, then explains to Rocky Balboa's brother why so-called "business socks" go all the way up to the wearer's knees... I threw more than one handful of popcorn at the screen while shouting "just shut up and fucking do something already!" during this movie and as such I was damn unhappy afterwards. Not only do I get the impression that precarious amounts of padding were added to the movie, but it also feels like it was all edited by a stoned film school student just trying to squeeze in 90 minutes of footage before heading out to the Friday night bar crawl. It's just sad... actually, it's not just sad, it's borderline offensive and "barbed wire across the ass crack" irritating.

The acting wasn't bad. John Saxon owned his scenes, but they were sadly lacking in screentime. David Huffman (who was stabbed to death with a screwdriver five years later by a thief he had decided to pursue and play real life hero with) performed well enough as the hero, while Marianna Hill is sympathetic and lovable enough as the distraught Cathy who’s just tormented throughout the movie. Burt Young worked fine as the Bullockian Royko, but never really convinced me that there was any actual need for the character at all to be honest. Speaking of useless characters, despite her extensive time onscreen despite only being a minor character, the old bag lady served no purpose and could have easily been dismembered from the script and her time reworked around giving John Saxon more exposure. Jeff Bloom’s direction is a lot of simplistic stuff mixed with some of the laziest point-of-view work you'll ever see, while the soundtrack is expectedly generic, and the monster design is just odd and neither terrifying or awe inspiring. It seriously just looks like a big penis infected with the world's nastiest STD.

And so ends today's lesson folks: the reason cool box art exists is to mask the often bland, nonsensical and/or otherwise pointless downpour of useless bullshit awaiting you within. Never have truer words been spoken... by a guy with a jackal's head and a human's body. I won't see that any and all copies of the movie need to be hunted down and destroyed, but nor will I advise anyone to put the effort needed into finding yourself a copy. It's just another cool premise wasted on an otherwise disposable b-movie.