Beneath

Went into this with sort of high expectations. Love a good water monster film and don't mind them low budget. I saw this trailer a while back on You Tube and thought it looked good. Basic premise - characters all with annoying character traits and not that enjoyable to watch end up on a lake with a medium sized fish puppet. Maybe my expectations were too high but the movie doesn't deliver on the trailer.

The creature looked awful and probably the most fake I have seen besides most the creatures on SYFY. They show too many close up, medium and long shots of real bad fish model which clearly looks fake. I appreciate, what looked to be, practical effects over CGI but in this case it didn't help the film. Some of the better scenes with the fish is when it is submerged in the water or a shadow in the water. Its huge eyes look fake as and should have been darker to hide that fake-ness.

The story is unremarkable and the characters, as written, are awful. I feel the actors did their job and no criticisms there - though none shine through. The director, I feel is sloppy as there is no build up for tension in his scenes, he rushes moments that should have levity (most death scenes besides the first girls) and the cinematography is amateurish. The director should have been in control of these aspects. The aspects of having friends making decisions about who to use as fish bait is as stupid as it sounds and comes across like voting for Big Brother. The teen love triangle and angst did leave some room for the actors to emote but again the director I feel didn't push or get the best out of them. The editing and the music was god awful and ruined some aspects of the suspense in scenes being too loud/bombastic when a softer more ambient soundtrack would have been better.

With all that said I WOULD advocate for the director to be financed and to continue developing and the film was not a complete waste. It does sit well with SYFY type of films and as stated my expectations may have been too high has it was a awesome trailer.

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.

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???

A gaggle of teenagers who've just graduated high school go on a rural excursion together before they all head their separate ways. They end up on a boat, on a lake, and at least one of their number, Johnny (Daniel Zovatto), seems to know the score. He's heard "legends" regarding the place. As it turns out, this dumb bunch ends up stranded on the boat - which develops leaks - and franticly trying to make it to shore when a goofy monster fish shows up and, every so often, gobbles up one of them.

It's a shame, really. You expect more from writer / director / editor Larry Fessenden ("Habit", "Wendigo") than this kind of cheese ball entertainment. It seems as if he's trying to rise it above most of the efforts in this genre by ruminating on the idea of the depths to which people will sink when it comes to saving their own worthless lives. How much does friendship and family count for in such a situation?

Negating whatever honest intentions Fessenden may have had is the fact that this is one truly despicable bunch of jerks. This is the kind of movie where you root for the monster, by default, to eat everybody because there's not one human character on hand that's tolerable. Zeke (Griffin Newman) is one of the worst because he's a walking cliché: the kind of film geek / aspiring filmmaker who stubbornly insists on filming everything, the kind of guy who drives this viewer right up the wall.

The acting is pretty bad from most everybody concerned, which doesn't help matters. The young cast is amateurish, with just one old pro present: veteran character actor Mark Margolis ("Pi", 'Breaking Bad'), who has just two scenes.

The design for the monster fish is, as was said, rather goofy, but the visual effects are better than one might expect; the fish actually feels like a physical presence in the movie. And there is a smattering of amusing gore throughout.

This isn't one that this viewer would really recommend, unless you have a high tolerance for bad writing and bad acting.

Four out of 10.