The Sand

Sandwiches There

The Sand
USA 2015 Directed by Isaac Gabaeff
Frightfest presets DVD Region 2

Why can you never get hungry on a beach? Because of all the sand-which-is there!

Or, in the case of this film, The Sand, the answer is... because you are an unknown, carnivorous creature sitting under a large area of the sand and feasting upon any humans who get even close to making contact with said sand. 

Okay, so this film is another of the free DVDs I snagged at Frightfest some years ago and, again, it’s one of the better ones although, it does have some negative stuff in it too. Now, the first thing I thought of when I looked at the title was that it’s maybe a remake of the old 80s classic Blood Beach (a film sorely in needing of a modern HD release) and, even in Alan Jones’ introduction to the movie, which is an option to play on this DVD, he mentions that particular film. However, this movie isn’t really a straight up remake of that one at all and, although I wasn’t quite as taken with it as Mr. Jones, I did have a fairly good time with it, it has to be said.

The opening ten minutes or so was a little hard to get through for me, consisting of chaotic, shaky cellular phone footage of a teen party taking place on the beach one night, to establish some of the characters and also that the organiser had asked for everyone to put thier phones in a bag (yeah, that’s not going to be a set up for a scene later in the movie now, is it?) and that one of the party goers finds this huge, seaweedy looking rock, which most audience members will probably realise is an egg from early on. The party footage is interspersed with languid shots of an abandoned beach the next morning, in slow and languorous camera movements. Wait... did I say abandoned? No, there are eight people left sleeping from ‘the night before’ (four guys and four gals), all in the same area of the beach. Two on a lifeguard station, four in a car, one on a bench and one stuffed into an oil can by his friends.

As they come back to life and before their feet touch the sand, one of them sees a gull land on the sand, get stuck and then get eaten by it. She tries to warn the others (all are within earshot and sight of each other) but the hungover girl on the beach immediately gets stuck on the sand and shares the same fate as the bird... but not before one of the guys in the car runs to the rescue and gets similarly stuck and eaten himself (in one of the more picturesque and believable pieces of goriness in the movie). It soon becomes clear that the found ‘egg’ hatched at some point and all the other people at the party the night before have been eaten by the beach, in this abandoned strip where barely anyone comes. Once the surviving six realise that they can’t touch the sand and, once various hot dogs have been thrown  to try and ascertain the size and shape of the area of the sand which is hostile, the film consists of the various attempts of these remaining people to escape their fate, as the rules of ‘the sand’ and the monster beneath become more defined and their number gradually diminishes. 

And it is an entertaining movie with some nice performances by the likes of Brooke Butler and Meagan Holder. Some of the sequences, such as when one of the girls is balancing on the back bumper of the car trying to get the trunk open to get to the bag of phones inside, are fairly intense and suspenseful. Which makes it even more annoying when I say that, in some ways, the budget lets the film down a little. I know it’s a low budget horror production (shot in twelve days with the same cast and crew after another movie which fell through... I get it) and that’s often the best kind but, I have to say that much of the CGI in this really lets it down and I kinda wish they’d gone for more practical effects. When a passing policeman (temporarily protected by his non-organic shoes for a short while) who obviously doesn’t believe what’s going on, get his arm chomped off by the beast, the resulting stump gushing blood looks totally unrealistic and just, I dunno, kind of watery. 

Similarly, although the gazillions of small, cotton like tendrils of the creature which raise up from the sand when anything is in close proximity look quite effective but, when they decide to go full on giant tentacle terror towards the end of the movie, the CGI appendages just don’t look like they’re there in the same shot... they literally look like they’ve been cartooned over the top of the film (which they kinda have, I guess).

However, special effects don’t maketh the movie and, though I would have liked more money pumped into the effects work (and I rarely ever say that about special effects because, I usually don’t care anything about them), it was still an entertaining ride of a modern horror B-movie and I think it would play well as part of a an all nighter with friends and liberal amounts of alcohol. The Sand is nowhere near one of the better monster movies I’ve seen but, there’s obviously a lot of love gone into this one and it kinda works.