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DIRECTOR: Don E. FauntLeRoy RELEASE DATE: November 9, 2013 RATING (US): NR
CAST: Cassie Scerbo, Brandon Beemer, Jonathan Lipnicki et al.
// review by Lydia

Hard to keep my Berings.

I have got to stop torturing myself with these movies.

My intelligence can only handle so much before my IQ starts dropping like it's hot.

Here I am yet again with another monster movie! I have to admit, contrary to the beginning two sentences, I really enjoy cringing at these garbage masterpieces. They're horribly entertaining and provide quite a few laughs and eyerolls at the expense of the atrocious acting and digital effects. That being said, this isn't a confession of how the Bering Sea Beast movie actually rates in my book. My book still has standards, you know. I decided to take a stab at this B-movie beast hoping beyond hopes it wasn't just another EEK A SHARK movie. Thankfully (or not so thankfully), I got something worse... MUCH worse.

Beast of the Bering Sea is a jaunty tale of a dredging boat crew who have discovered lots of lovely gold alongside an ancient nest of creatures just below the sand who are ready to suck some blood as soon as they are gently poked. Chaos ensues in the story as well as every other aspect of the movie. You name it, it's pretty bad. The story of the Bering Sea Beast isn't actually that interesting. I could tell that those involved in this horror monstrosity were depending on the action and suspense...which is dumb. Can you really have a good movie without a good story? Even the old Godzilla movies had decent stories. The story in this movie is as cliché and predictable as it comes. I pretty much knew what was going to happen half an hour before the event actually happened.

"OH NO! So-and-so got killed!"

"The monsters have returned with a vengeance!"

"Plan A to kill the monsters failed horribly!"

Called it. Not surprised at all.

As for the acting, it was just funny how awful it was. The main actor had only two facial expressions the entire time: stoic and "I'm talking to my son. Must look like I'm actually enjoying being constipated for three days straight." There was a set of twins apparently. I couldn't tell because the brother looked and sounded at least 6 years younger than the girl. Seriously, his voice cracked and everything the whole time. The acting was like sucking peanut butter through a straw. It was forceful and in short bursts. Unfortunately, there was much "ad-libbing" to be heard again and again...and again. No lie. I bet the cast shouted "Let's go! Come on!" at LEAST 150 times during the movie. Every time there was blank space for the actors, they immediately slung out their go-to phrases, repeating them over and over until I was actually laughing at it. Here they are in their time of peril being chased by a blood-sucking beast, and they're just barely running while shouting the same two phrases at each other. The only person who managed to make the acting palatable was a secondary character, the marine biologist. You deserved better than this movie, Jaqueline Fleming.

That's not even the worst of it. Throughout this mess of a movie, there are (obviously) shots of people being maimed, murdered, and otherwise having a very bad day. If you had a monster feasting on your eyeball, how would you react? Would you flail around trying to rip it off? Would you fall on the ground in pain? Or would you, like the actors in the Bering Sea Beast, stand perfectly still and gently shake your head like you're trying to get that annoying piece of hair off of your face? Not once, but several times attacked people seemed very underwhelmed at their deaths.

As to be expected, the digital effects and monster design were incredibly inferior. I'm actually convinced that the monster was just a wet puppet most of the time. The move hyped up the monster by claiming that it was worse than sharks which are, as they say, the "worst things known to man." Nope, not cancer or hippopotamus attacks or heart disease. Sharks are obviously the worst, and the Bering Sea Beasts are even worse than that! Yeah, I'm not convinced a monster that is the Frankenstein of a manta ray and a cobra that got stuck in some oil spill is the worst thing to happen to the world. The darn thing was just a flimsy plastic puppet that the people threw around. The beasts are able to fly, swim, and squelch around on dry land, all of which look incredibly ridiculous. They feed by "hugging" their prey to death, which makes the person magically disappear...which is also strange because the scientist said they only sucked the blood out of their prey. Not only that, but they also lay eggs in people's bodies erupting in what is a complete rip-off of the chestburster scene from Alien. That scene scarred me as a kid, but the scene in Bering Sea Beast made me roll my eyes. They just tried to rip off what they thought was the best of horror movies.

I should probably mention how amateur this film comes off as well. The movie team obviously didn't want to spend any money on proper lighting, so they used natural lighting and the lights from the boats and the dock. I don't know if they were trying for realism, but the end result was rather dark. Seriously, I turned up the brightness thinking it was just the video quality or my computer being buggy, but it wasn't. The movie is just exceptionally dark in all the times that we actually needed to see what was going on. Since the monsters only came out at night (no surprise there), all the monster scenes and action sequences were WAY too dark. Also, at times, there were actually boat riggings or some other assortment of random things in the way of the shot. Oh, there's someone on a boa—oh, wait. There's a giant metal object in the way of the shot! Guess I'll have to use my imagination as to what's going on. That would probably be more interesting than the movie anyway.

In short, Beast of the Bering Sea was an okay idea for a movie that was about something other than sharks. However, the acting, animation, and direction made this film want me to have a creature nibbling on my eyeballs. If all of those elements were up to par, I could maybe forget about how here, there, and everywhere the story went. There were very few things that were actually good about this movie, but that just makes it a pretty standard B-movie. I give the move a C for effort and a D for everything else.

D for dead in the water.


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