On this All Hallows Eve eve, I harken back to the humble beginnings of Horrortoberfest 13 years ago when I was just watching whatever crap Netflix had available to stream. This meant that the vast majority of what I was watching was the lowest budget, crappiest schlock horror nonsense that they could buy for cheap to shove onto the platform. These days I tend to spend actual money on renting real movies and have weeks of diving into certain sub-genres or movies with connected thematic ideas. Well, today I look at The Sand where there is a beach that eats people.

A bunch of college kids at the start of Spring Break decide to go down to their local beach and have a raging party at night. There’s plenty of booze, music, dancing, and a weird alien egg thing that a couple chucklefucks found. The next morning, only a scant few of the people that had been at the party are still there; just the ones that slept on something other than the beach. When our obligatory topless girl that fell asleep on the picnic bench gets up and steps on the sand, she finds she cant move and gets dragged under. Turns out there is something underneath the sand that can get you if you touch it so now our remaining survivors are stranded and must occasionally play a deadly game of The Floor is Lava in order to find a way off the beach.

Now, the best thing this movie has going for it is the concept. The whole idea of something in the sand will get you if you touch it makes for an interesting set-up where you have these little islands of safety (a car, a table, a lifeguard station, a barrel) that the characters can exist in but still have to deal with their other problems. They are all in bathing suits and don’t really have shelter from the sun, they don’t have food or water, and one character is stuck in a barrel, which is incredibly painful for them. Obviously, you also have to throw in some drama where one of the guys is cheating on his girlfriend with another woman and all three of them are in the survivor group. Even the little hair-like tendrils that we first see that come out of the sand to get you are kind of an interesting effect.

All of that being said, this is not a movie with anything resembling a budget or talent. The actors are passable enough to watch that you don’t actively cringe when they deliver lines but neither are they going to be winning any awards any time soon. The little hair tendrils are kind of neat when they show up initially but once the movie tries to amp up the effects it becomes apparent very quickly that they did not have the money for that. It never reaches Birdemic level cheapness but is still distractingly bad given how unnecessary it was. Which is to say that this movie hits the exact right sweet spot of B-movie where it’s stupid and bad but also fun and campy such that it makes for a perfect “Bad Movie Night” pick. You can groan at the delivery of some lines, poke fun at the lackluster cgi, but still enjoy watching the plot while you do so.

I am just glad that some people are still making earnest low budget movies and not Sharknado type films where they are going into it purposefully trying to make something “so bad it’s good”.

Score: 3.5 out of 5