Beneath

There was not a single person I cared about dying in this flick.

There's no word to describe this movie because it was awful from beginning to end. I usually check on IMDb to see if a movie is worth watching but I checked on the wrong movie (there are two movies called Beneath on IMDb).

At first I thought it would be a good movie to see, I didn't expect any masterpiece but from the very first moment I saw that ancient fish I realized this was gonna be a waste of time, I needed to watch the end of the movie though just to warrant my first impression, but the bad acting, the poor effects and the lack of budget made me write my very first comment on IMDb just to prevent you from watching this movie, plus the storyline was unclear, I didn't even know why they decided to use the rowboat, knowing (one of them) it would be very likely to be attacked by the fish or that one of the boys decides to take a swim.

Do yourself a favor and skip this movie, it's a waste of time.

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.

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.

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???