Bering Sea Beast

Somewhere on the coast of Alaska, by the gold-rich Bering Sea, feisty blonde Cassie Scerbo (as Donna Hunter) gives new deckhand Brandon Beemer (as Owen Powers) the cold shoulder. He has been hired by her silver-haired prospector father Kevin Dobson (as Glenn Hunter), for reasons later revealed. Also on board is Ms. Scerbo's muscular blond brother Jonathan Lipnicki (as Joe Hunter). He has a bigger secret than his father does. This seafaring family and their crew like to dive for gold. In the opening minutes, Mr. Lipnicki discovers the first of several victims...

Apparently, divers have disturbed a hoard of hungry "sea vampires." Professor of marine biology Jacqueline Fleming (as Megan Arthur) wants to study the creatures and dastardly Lawrence Turner (as Travis Thorne) wants to outbid Mr. Dobson for diving rights. All of this begins as an interesting science fiction, but ends up being silly and tedious. The best part of the story is an interesting brother-sister relationship written by Brook Durham and performed very well by Scerbo and Lipnicki. They threw a little something worthy into this one.

***** Beast of the Bering Sea (11/9/13) Don E. FauntLeRoy ~ Cassie Scerbo, Jonathan Lipnicki, Brandon Beemer, Kevin Dobson

Working on a potentially-loaded gold vein, a family of gold-hunters in the Arctic comes across the truth behind a local legend when they disturb the resting area of a group of vicious vampiric predators and must save the town from the ravenous creatures.

This is an incredibly fun if flawed entry amongst the Sci-Fi Channel efforts, though it actually does a lot more right than wrong. One of the biggest pluses here is the absolutely fun and exciting plot-line that allows this one to be loaded with action scenes, especially in the later half which is when the creatures get free and are able to wreck havoc in the town. With plenty of fun encounters including the ambush at sea in the dark that shows the hunters' trap is far from effective that allows the creatures to feast on them in some nice behavioral-attack scenes, an effective encounter in the warehouse that finally leads to a discovery about their weakness and the final match at sea armed with their chosen weapons in a thrilling battle against the creatures which has plenty of momentum turns, some suspenseful moments thrown into the mix and an explosive ending that makes for a fun and exciting finish, the finale gets quite a bit of enjoyable moments out of itself that's coupled nicely with some really good action scenes earlier on. As well, the creatures are given a rather inventive back-story that makes them far more than just unexplained things creeping up out of the darkness, but have a more understandable biology and behavior that most other creatures in these films are never graced with and offers a touch of sympathy when combined with the real reason for their appearance in the modern world. That said, there's still some problems here, mainly in the rather atrocious CGI here with some utterly abysmal work on the creatures that make them look like pixilated bat wings with fangs without any sort of detail to the beast completely neutered among the blurred nature of the scene, and when done in conjunction with the blood and gore makes for quite a troubling experience. As well, it features a few troubling story lines that make no sense, including the effort to include the human villain amongst their plans or the need for secrecy regarding their appearance, a common trait that serves nothing original here and really does this one little favors. Otherwise, this here was quite enjoyable enough.

Rated UR/R: Graphic Violence and Language.

Have you noticed that the more terrible the movie the more the lead characters are constantly saying," Go go go, Or bring up hurry up " All at the same time. This one is so bad you can see the wires on the creatures.

Bering Sea Beast (2013)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

The Bering Sea has become so popular with "Deadliest Catch" I guess it was just a matter of time before SyFy used it for one of their monster movies. A family of fisherman team up with a scientist when they discover that the old legend of "sea vampires" are actually true and now the creatures are attacking people who work this part of the sea. BERING SEA BEAST is pretty much what you'd expect from a SyFy film as they take a name some know (Jonathan Lipnicki, the kid in JERRY MAGUIRE) and mix in a rather silly story and some of the worst special effects that you're ever going to witness. These awful effects are certainly the highlight of the film because it's clear that they either didn't have much money to come up with something better or they just wanted to make them so bad that people would talk about them and bring other viewers to the film. These effects are certainly among the dumbest you're ever going to see in a SyFy film but they did get me thinking that it would be pretty fun for a filmmaker to make a documentary about all the horrid effects these types of films have produced over the past decade. I will say that the effects are so silly and bad that they do somewhat keep you "entertained" by everything else going on. None of the performances are all that memorable but I will say that Cassie Scerbo helps keep the film moving. As for the former child star Lipnicki, it's certainly nice seeing him as he is today but his performance was pretty bad. The death scenes are all mostly forgettable but then again the bad CGI really doesn't help anything. What keeps BERING SEA BEAST from being entertaining is the fact that it takes itself way too serious. I've never understood how the filmmakers could give us such awful effects but at the same time expect us to take everything else serious.

"Bering Sea Beast" is one of those monster movies, literally bad to the bone.

The story here is about a family of treasure salvagers have taken on a new hired deckhand. When they accidentally set free an aquatic monstrosity that have now gotten the taste for human flesh. These creatures of local legend, sea vampires, surface and wreck havoc on the community.

Actually the story here is straight forward and very easy to follow, albeit it is incredibly stupid and predictable.

Worse yet, are the special effects. The creatures, these sea vampires, were hilarious to look at. They were so fake and so badly animated that you can't take them seriously for one second. Even the sound they were making was cliché. The concept idea for the creatures was initially nice and the creature design was alright, but it went terribly wrong with the horrible CGI effects.

The acting itself by the people on the cast list was good enough, they just didn't have a proper script or something solid to work with.

You know from the very moment you sit down to watch this movie that it is going to be one of those movies that the SyFy Channel are famous for.

If you enjoy badly scripted monster movies with horrible CGI effects, then by all means, "Bering Sea Beast" should be right up your alley.