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.

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.

Beware what's lurking in the lake. Six friends celebrate one last break together, but encounter a deadly, man eating fish.

I'd be surprised if anyone who watches this film, is going to go into it with any high expectations, mine were pretty low, and were realised.

A low budget attempted gore fest, which has quite literally been done to death. Sadly it doesn't offer up anything original, and the million other times it's been done, it's been done better.

If you like those films on the horror channel, megalodon, sharktopus and ghostshark etc, then this may be up your Street, for me, it was almost a painful watch, apart from a few moments of tension.

Clichés galore, including the handsome, irritating jock, I have thrown him in first.

Mark Margolis is hugely wasted here, which is a shame, as he is the one here that provides any sort of presence, the group of youngsters are energetic, if perhaps a little raw.

Poor, 4/10.

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.