After the last Polonia brothers movie I watched (the dreadful Splatter Farm which I reviewed here), I couldn't imagine wanting to see more of their work. Camp Motion Pictures will be inflicting Splatter Beach upon the public as a two-disk set on October 9, and when the review copy arrived in the mail I felt compelled to give it a spin. It's been about twenty years since Splatter Farm, and as awful as that movie was I was curious to see how far John and Mark Polonia have come as film makers. And I must admit the presence of actress Erin Brown, better known as softcore film star Misty Mundae was also a deciding factor. What can I say; she's easy on the eyes. I'm a little confused about Ms. Brown's reason for using a second name. If she's attempting to keep films like this one separate from her other body of work (she remains fully clothed throughout the film), why does it specifically say on the box cover that she is also known as Misty Mundae?

Things get off to a promising start when a shambling sea creature makes its way out of Lake Erie and attacks a gratuitously showering victim. The creature is fairly cheap looking, but the seams in the costume are kept hidden by using a lot of quick cuts. Things start going downhill once the plot begins to kick in. People are disappearing at a rate of six per month, and Rupert (David Fife) the journalism student is sure he's going to get the story of a lifetime. His annoying buddy Rodney (Brice Kennedy) -- a thirty-ish white guy trying to sound like a rapper -- and Rodney's girlfriend Tonya (Erika Smith) have rented a seaside house near the ominously named Splatter Beach.

Brown plays Tess, a young woman whose boyfriend was killed by the creatures, but since no one believes her story she is regarded as a crank. There's also a bodybuilder named Duke (Ken Van Sant) who is constantly pumping iron and reciting lines that are intended to be funny. His use of the phrase "Holy farting Hercules!" when he sees the monsters for the first time is sure to garner the film some award or another. Meanwhile a handful of characters are introduced solely for the purpose of becoming Purina Monster Chow, and there are scenes at a beach party that, oddly enough, are achieved using green screen, though I'm not sure why. The band Riptide and the frollicking partygoers were obviously shot separately and composited over the beach backdrop. This makes for some extremely unnatural looking interaction between the folks at the party and the actors who are actually shot on the beach.

What we have here basically is an homage to teen/beech/monster movies of the fifties and sixties like The Horror of Party Beach, with some modern gore and nudity thrown in. This would be fine if the Polonia brothers didn't feel the need to insult the audience's intelligence by throwing in several metric tons of painfully unfunny humor. Time was putting a man in a dress was the cheapest laugh a film could hope for, but modern film has replaced the man in drag with the white (or occasionally asian) guy trying to sound black. Twenty years of making movies and this is the best they can do for characterization? The marginal improvement in production values has more to do with the step up to a low budget production from a zero budget one than any evolution of style or skill.

Like most Camp Motion Pictures releases, there are plenty of extras, including an audio commentary from the directors and actor Van Sant, another Polonia brothers flick from the 80s (no thank you), an interview with musician Jon McBride and a music video. The second disk in the set is actually a soundtrack CD, though none of the tunes in the film impressed me enough to bother listening to them separately. If you're at all curious you can check out the trailer here, but I recommend steering clear of this one.

Tags: Cinema, Cinematical, John Polonia, JohnPolonia, Mark Polonia, MarkPolonia, Movies, Splatter Beach, Splatter Farm, SplatterBeach, SplatterFarm