Sea Beast: a.k.a. "Troglodyte" a.k.a. "Poor Corin Nemec"

We have yet another movie aired under a different name than it was produced as. In this case it is Sea Beast which was originally entitled, of all things, Troglodyte. Sea Beast is a much better title, but not enough to make this anything worth sitting through a second airing. It wasn't really worth the first airing, either, but I digress.

The story is based in a fishing town where the fishing just ain't as good as it used to be, and sailors are dying on a particular captain's crew more frequently than others. It doesn't help that some of the sailors are also seeing giant sea monsters hiding in the waves in stormy ocean waters. The opening sequence has promise by giving you a glimpse of the giant beastie, and shots of a smaller version of it hitching a ride on one of the lifeboats back to shore. However, the story gets bogged down in details about the main character's financial woes, personal loss, and general 'down and out'-ittude.

The characters are plentiful, but none stand out as colorful enough to keep the story afloat. Poor Corin Nemec is looking haggard and thin-haired, but he does try his best to portray a father trying to make enough money to send his spoiled snot of a daughter to college. He's really the only sympathetic character in the mess, and it's just sad, not endearing. The rest you either say 'Finally!' or just shrug when they get picked off by the rapidly multiplying critters.

The critters are at least interesting. They start off small, grow quickly, are amphibious, and are so good at camouflage as to be invisible. They also spit a lovely green goo at their victims, which paralyzes them so they can be eaten alive with nary a scream. They look like a cross between what the Loch Ness Monster might look like, and a lot of Discovery Channel sea dinosaur creations.

We get a lot of CGI of the beasties, but the storyline is so weak I kept drifting off to flashbacks of the movie Snakehead Terror, because there were so many similarities. Idyllic lakeside setting, vicious, rapidly multiplying killer sea creature, teenagers going off alone to an island cabin only to be set upon and picked off by the beasties surrounding them. Irritating daughter that should get killed off if there were any justice in the B-movie world, yet lives to scream about her friends getting eaten. They even have a similar use of electricity to kill off a whole bunch of the monsters at once.

There's not much to commend this to anything other than the huge pile of 'Eh, I watched it and survived. What's next?' pile. It's watchable, but boring. There's too many entrails for my taste which translates to 'We don't have enough dialogue other than screaming to make this stretch to 90 minutes.' It was a waste of a couple of hours of an afternoon, but didn't provide any giggle factor, and definitely not enough cheese. If you want to enjoy something cheesy that has sea monsters, try The Beast, Octopus, or Kraken: Tentacles Of The Deep. Any of the aforementioned may not be classics, but at least they have the requisite cheese and giggle factor that makes a bad movie enjoyable.