Beneath

Gathering together for one last trip following high school graduation, a group of friends' trip to a small nearby lake forces them to come face-to-face with the lake's monstrous fish creature living there and try to find a way to get out alive.

This one here had just a never-ending series of problems against it that there's not a whole lot of good points for it. The biggest issue with the film is that the film thinks these kinds of callous, vile humans are worthy of being the center-stage for the actions in here, yet none of them are ever worthy of doing anything more than being cannon fodder for the creature as other, smarter characters fought it off. Relying on bullying, cheating, blackmail and deciding that others where more worthy of living and dumping their friends overboard to die with the creature in the lake with them is perhaps the biggest death-knell to each of these characters, especially since all the while there's more than enough tactics on hand to actually fight it off with a gallant effort without resorting to dumping your friends in with the creature that even thinking of resorting to that tactic is really hard to forgive. Of course, the fact that there's one who knows the truth about it but decides against telling the others so that he can win the heart of the group's resident slut doesn't do much to favor this either, and the fact that this one tends to focus solely on the group sitting in the canoe arguing with each other tends to make for wholly uneventful programming with nothing interesting happening. That said, the gore isn't half-bad for the mangled bodies really look like they've been munched on and the creature does have some realistic looks to it since it's kept to a more reasonable size without being too gigantic to live there undetected, and frankly some of the sequences in the later half with the rapidly- drowning boat do get somewhat suspenseful. Overall, though, there's not too much to like here.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence.

kind of the opposite of the other movie I watched today, I liked this one a lot less than I expected. Its gotten mixed reviews mostly on the good side Id say. Unfortunately it does not deserve the praise. What I did respect about the movie was the way the creature looked. It looked like they mostly used practical effects mixed with a little bit of cgi. This in my opinion was a great move on part of the directors. Using practical effects is almost a must for me. There has been a flood of cgi filled creature features and most of the time as soon as the crappy digitally animated creature shows up it pulls me right out of the movie. The creature in this movie looked great, Unfortunately the movie has nothing else going for it, The whole movie takes place around a group of teenagers stranded on a small boat. They make incredibly bad and unbelievable decisions that just make you mad and just over half way through I couldn't wait for this movie to end. It would have been nice to see them do something special with this cool creature and when it finds its first victim I thought things were looking up but they definitely went down from there.

The oversized antagonist of this run of the mill creature feature isn't a bad specimen and definitely looks like something out of the River Monsters alumni, not too far beyond realistic proportions. But that's about all I can praise in this otherwise irritating labour as six high school seniors try to stay afloat a sinking row boat as they're stalked by the voracious lake monster whilst tensions amongst the group threaten their survival.

Most of the characters are clichés (the nerd, the jock, the outsider) and some are plainly irritating, not to mention uneven as the plot meanders from one fatality to the next. It doesn't take long for this lemon to lose its zest, the brittle relationships deteriorating into ridiculous scenarios that accelerate the attrition rate beyond I'm sure even the appetite of the assailant. Aside from the abysmal acting and puerile dialogue, the key weakness in the plot is the fact that the riverbank is clearly visible in almost every shot, yet despite their obvious proximity to shore, these directionless debutantes never seem to get any closer to it. Had they been depicted further from land in a vast lake, the situation would've been more believable.

Unlike the typical monster movie, there's a rather morbid conclusion to this aimless outing, though it doesn't necessarily redeem the previous 80-minutes which even by B-movie standards is pretty mediocre.

Bad, not in a good way.

If you're going to make a low budget shark/croc/piranha knock off you need talent. No talent? You need good actors. No talent and no good actors available? You need really inventive kills. None of the above = weekend hobby film making. Dumb, illogical, boring boring boring. And, why did they always paddle towards the furthest shore???

This filmmaker needs to get someone with writing talent to write the scripts for his films. The biggest weakness of this movie is the pathetic script itself. You can forgive the low budget special effects, because it is in fact a low budget film. But the poorly written script makes it impossible to even care about the characters. I found myself disliking every character. There wasn't a single character in the movie that I felt was worth saving, so when death approached, I was thinking, oh please, just get it over with. These teens, who are supposed to be good friends, barely react when the first one of them dies. And it never gets past that. Their lack of real terror or emotion means that the audience lacks terror and emotion. It's not cheesy enough to be a cult favorite where it's so bad it's good. This movie just leaves you shaking your head. I didn't give it a 1, because I gave credit for some decent cinematography.