There have been reports of people being killed by sea monsters, and a fledgling journalist named Rupert (Dave Fife) sets to get to the bottom of the matter. While his horny friends Rodney (Brice Kennedy) and Tonya (Erika Smith) are off boning at his parent’s beach house, Rupert is combing the beach looking for clues. After dispatching the horndog couple, the monsters crash a rock concert on the beach.
Directed by Mark and John Polonia, Splatter Beach is a hit-or-miss, sometimes fun, sometimes silly send-up of beach party movies and late-night creature features. The animated opening credits sequence nicely sets the tone, which is kind of like a mix between Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Horror of Party Beach, and Humanoids from the Deep. While much of this is wildly uneven, I did enjoy the monsters, who look like a seaweed-covered version of The Slime People. The beach party scenes are less effective, but you can have fun with them, just for the fact that it’s obvious that many of the concertgoers are dancing against a greenscreen background of a beach.
While the opening is fun, the second half suffers from a lot of padding. Long scenes from The Creature from the Haunted Sea play out on TV, and there’s music video sequences that contain scenes of stuff we’ve previously seen. Despite all this, it’s moderately fun and entertaining, although it falls short of being laugh-out-loud funny. In fact, it might’ve eked by with *** if the finale hadn’t been so damned anticlimactic. (It’s shown in a series of still photographs.)
Although B-Movie Queen Misty Mundae is top billed, she’s not in it nearly as much as you would think. She plays the crazy neighbor who knows all about the monsters, but of course, nobody believes her. Misty brightens up the movie whenever she appears, and I wish we saw a lot more of her. (If you catch my meaning.)
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