Dead Sea (2014)

• Directed by Brandon Slagle
• Written by Brandon Slagle
• Stars Britt Griffith, Alexis Lacono, JW Wiseman, Devanny Pinn
• Run Time: 1 Hour, 30 Minutes
• Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5g_Y1MeLLU

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

This starts with a lake monster and goes to soldiers in the desert years later and then some characters do stuff and then there’s more lake monster and characters do more stuff. It’s kind of disjointed, but it comes together eventually. It’s not really done very well, and we didn’t enjoy it at all.

Synopsis

California, 1983. We watch a tearful farewell as a young father leaves his wife and child before taking a canoe out to feed himself to an unseen sea monster.

In the Middle East, 2002, soldiers shoot at the locals and interrogate prisoners. They incorporate all the cliches of a desert warfare movie. This goes on for a long time, and seems to have nothing to do with a sea monster. Why are we watching this?

One of the soldiers asks another, about what happened to his father in 1983. The soldier explains that the monster shows up every thirty years to feed. How did the other soldier know anything happened? Why did the subject of a sea monster come up in the middle of a desert battle?

We cut to a woman talking about a “dig site,” and then switch to a hairy hillbilly in bed marking days off a calendar. The woman with the dig site is Victoria, and she’s a heavy drinker. There’s some stuff between drug dealers who act sad after murdering a guy.

We cut to a bunch of young people on a pontoon boat in the summer. One of them is named Auriel. We cut back and forth between young people in bikinis and the hillbilly guy talking to a guy named Castor. Castor watches the young people with his binoculars.

The young people jump in the water and everything gets dark and creepy. All of a sudden, everyone in the water is bloody and dead. Castor watches it all but doesn’t react. He rows to the pontoon boat in his canoe and looks around.

Later, Auriel wakes up on the shore.

Victoria gets a phone call from some guy who wants her to check out a report of dead fish on the lakeshore. He called her because she’s familiar with the area. The reports are similar to those from 1983 and 1953.

Some woman mumbles some stuff. The hillbilly marks another day off his calendar. One of the drug dealers has flashbacks to the desert thing. I think maybe it’s the same guy, but I don’t know because no one talks to him.  I started browsing Reddit while rolling my eyes at this thing. I’ll stop back in if something interesting happens in this…

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…

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OK, so Victoria and the drug soldier, Kier, know each other, and the hillbilly is Victoria’s father, Callan. We’re nearly an hour into this, and I’ve finally figured out who the characters are!

Auriel tells Victoria that there’s a sea monster in the man-made reservoir. Some other guys say, “The offering must be a native.” Auriel says Victoria needs to be the sacrifice because she’s local.

There is running and screaming and men walking slowly with guns. Somehow, chasing Victoria through caves in the desert has something to do with the sea monster.

Eventually, Callum decides to be the sacrifice so that Victoria can leave town.

Commentary

It’s like the director had a bunch of random footage and just decided to throw it all together and call it a film. It started out making no sense and then just got worse and worse as it went along, seemingly without any limit to the worsening.

The acting is atrocious. The direction is atrocious. The story and plot are atrocious. The sound design is atrocious. The special effects are atrocious. The lighting…. Oh, you get the idea.

This is… just terrible. If you see this DVD in the bottom of the bin at the dollar store, do the world a favor and buy them all, then go outside and run over them with your car. Then wash your hands three times to get the stink off.

Kevin’s Addendum to Brian’s review: I did get the DVD from the bin at the dollar store. I apologize to Brian and all of you for the damage I unknowingly inflicted.