Review by Ben Bussey
Sometimes, it feels like you learn all you need to know about a film from a single descriptive phrase. Hammer Horror, Slasher Movie, Torture Porn, Found Footage; all these titles carry with them a weight of expectation (or, sometimes, lack thereof), and more often than not as soon as we hear them we know immediately whether or not the film in question is one we expect to enjoy.
Today, we have another such phrase that singles out a very particular brand… the SyFy Original Movie. Damn Sea Vampires (originally entitled Beast of the Bering Sea, and also retitled Bering Sea Beast) is one of those. From those words alone, I suspect many readers will have already made their own conclusions about the film… and they won’t be far off.
For the benefit of readers who may be unfamiliar with the SyFy originals, let me reel off a few titles for you: Sharktopus, Dinocroc, Dinoshark, Pirahnaconda, Mega Python Vs Gatoroid, Sand Sharks, Ghost Shark, and – perhaps the best known of them all – Sharknado and Sharknado 2: the Second One. Somehow a whole new wave of predominantly shark-based low budget creature features has washed up in the wake of The Asylum’s Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (kind of alarming to realise that The Asylum, pioneers of cheap direct-to-DVD rip-offs of major blockbusters, have prompted rip-offs of their own), all of which follow the same essential formula: take a largely young and pretty cast, generally with at least one or two former celebrities thrown in for novelty value, drop them in a reasonably picturesque coastal setting, and have them flail about while they come under attack from a very badly rendered CGI monster. However, because it’s made for network TV, gore must be kept to a minimum, and swearing and nudity are pretty much out of the question – which makes it a little odd that the cover for Damn Sea Vampires bears the (slightly censored) tagline ‘Here Comes Deep Shit,’ when no such words are uttered in the film itself. Indeed, it might have been a more apt slogan had they removed the ‘deep’ part…
Other respects in which the cover is grossly misleading (although that’s kind of a given): at no point do we see the titular beasts swarming both sea and sky – indeed, if memory serves we never see more than one on screen at the same time – nor do any women in bikinis come under attack at any point. Indeed, the cast remain fully clothed throughout, including Jonathan Lipnicki (tick the novelty casting box), AKA the kid from Jerry Maguire, who has subsequently subverted expectation by getting into bodybuilding as an adult (Google it if you must, it’s faintly alarming) – yet his well-honed physique stays well under wraps from start to finish. As does any hint of acting ability left over from his child star days, I might add.
Plot-wise, it’s simple enough. Land-lubber Owen (Brandon Beemer) joins the salty sea-dog crew of a family-owned boat which specialises in dredging for gold. Alas, their latest claim brings forth more than just treasure, as they awaken a hitherto undisturbed school of underwater bloodsuckers, who get very territorial very quickly. Soon enough it’s only Owen and sibling team Donna and Joe (Cassandra Scerbo and Lipnicki) left alive – though naturally a marine biologist from the local university shows up (Jaqueline Fleming), who realises the crew may have stumbled across the zoological find of the century or some such. But are these hard-boiled dredgers going to let Dracula’s goldfish stand between them and the loot? Well, if they did it’d be a considerably shorter movie. And this might not have been a bad thing.
The key question that comes up time and again with these SyFy Original Movies is – who exactly are they for? They tend to play on the neo-grindhouse sensibility, yet being made for TV they’re very low on the exploitation elements which fans of such movies hope for. With their cut-price FX and absurd concepts, they’re prime mirth-making material for stoners and/or those with a particular fondness for low humour, yet for the most part the films themselves are played relatively straight – much as is the case here. I suppose in a sense it’s commendable that Damn Sea Vampires doesn’t camp it up and play it as a spoof, but at the same time I doubt anyone on either side of the camera is deluding themselves that viewers are actually going to get invested in the half-baked human drama which takes up the bulk of the running time, punctuated by the occasional thirty-second bat-shark thing attack to keep you from nodding off.
As has been noted many times here and elsewhere, it’s a very tricky proposition to try and manufacture cult material – and, by extension, it may be even trickier to try and manufacture a “so-bad-it’s-good” movie. Even so, SyFy seem determined to keep on trying, and given that I haven’t made a point of watching all their output (indeed, I’ve consciously avoided the Sharknados to date) I couldn’t honestly say whether or not they’ve succeeded yet. But I can safely say that – regardless of whether you call it Beast of the Bering Sea, Bering Sea Beast, or Damn Sea Vampires – this movie most definitely doesn’t do it.
Damn Sea Vampires is out now on Region 2 DVD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.