The Sand

Plot synopsis:
A group of friends are having a party at the beach with some of their classmates. A girl named Heather (Etalvia Cashin) is videoing the party, when two of the boys, Vance (Hector David Jr.) and Gilbert (Cleo Berry), find a large ball covered in a strange gooey substance. All the teenagers agree to put their mobile phones in the trunk of a car in an effort to ensure that no one will post compromising pictures or videos online.
The next morning two of the friends, Kaylee (Brooke Butler) and Mitch (Mitchel Musso) wake up on the lifeguard shack. Kaylee's boyfriend, Jonah (Dean Geyer), awakens in a nearby convertible next to a girl named Chanda (Meagan Holder). In the back seat are Vance and his girlfriend, Ronnie (Cynthia Murell). Gilbert wakes up, stuck from the waist down in a trash barrel, having been put there as a prank after passing out. A girl named Marsha (Nikki Leigh) wakes up, topless, having fallen asleep on top of a picnic table. The rest of the teenagers, including Heather, are nowhere to be found; there are, instead, a bunch of empty sleeping bags in their places.
Marsha accuses Heather of having stolen her top; she leaves the picnic table to find her. Kaylee, having witnessed a bird getting sucked into the sand tries to warn her, but Marsha doesn't listen. She is immediately immobilized in the sand and is visibly discombobulated when she gets. Vance attempts to help her but he, too, becomes trapped when he touches the sand. Vance and Marsha are swallowed by the creature, as their bodies sink into the sand, much to the horror of their friends. Jonah sees the cracked ball from the night before and concludes that it must have been an egg, and whatever hatched from it has burrowed under the sand and has wiped out everyone, including Vance, Heather, and Marsha.
The group cannot call for help, as their phones are locked in the trunk of the car, and the car's battery is dead from their having left the headlights on all night. Mitch and Kaylee find hot dogs in the lifeguard shack and toss them at different ends of the beach to find out the extent of the creature under the sand. Thus they find the edge of it, and the group is momentarily hopeful until they realize the distance is too great. Jonah uses two surfboards as a bridge to reach the picnic table. He makes it to the table, but not before the creature has slashed his stomach, leaving a painful wound that starts to seep pus. He notes to the others, though, that the creature won't go near the ashes of the previous night's bonfire, indicating that it hates fire.
The sun beats down. Ronnie and Chanda attempt to retrieve the phones from the trunk of the car, but Ronnie becomes trapped, her fingers crushed under the rim of the trunk. A beach patrolman (Jamie Kennedy) drives onto the beach. The group warns him, then are shocked to see him get out of his car and walk across the sand unmolested. Mitch realizes that the man's boots are protecting him. The patrolman, seeing Jonah's and Ronnie's injuries and Gilbert stuck in the trash barrel, assumes the group is on drugs and taunts them.
But the patrolman drops his keys in the sand, and when he reaches to pick them up, his hand is captured. He uses his pepper spray, which temporarily saves him, but in the process, his lower arm has been consumed; the shock causes him to fall, and he is sucked into the sand. Kaylee, however, manages to retrieve his pepper spray. The pepper spray gives Mitch an idea: he thinks he can get to the truck by putting his flip-flops on and wrapping his feet with towels soaked in pepper spray. Chanda throws him a towel from the car, but when Mitch attempts to catch it the banister breaks and he falls to the sand and is devoured by the sand creature in a gruesome fashion.
Kaylee, after a brief moment of sadness, takes charge. She frees Ronnie's fingers from the car trunk, then has Chanda take the broken pieces of the boardwalk and use them as a bridge to get to Jonah on the picnic table. Meanwhile, Gilbert discovers that he has cut his stomach on the edge of the trash barrel during his attempts to escape, thus alerting the creature.
Kaylee and Ronnie each make their way across the makeshift bridge to Chanda and Jonah. At the last step, Ronnie trips and, despite Kaylee's efforts with the pepper spray, she dies and sucked into the sand by the creature. Chanda, in desperation, follows through with Mitch's plan and runs across the sand to the truck with pepper-sprayed towels wrapping her feet. The group celebrates for a brief moment as she succeeds. But just then, Gilbert is attacked by the creature, sucked down through the bottom of the barrel. The creature, having grown much larger tentacles, bangs against the patrol car, knocking Chanda unconscious.
At nightfall, Chanda wakes up and recuperates. She gets to the back of the truck and finds a self-inflatable raft. Chanda inflates the raft, and Kaylee and Jonah use it to reach the patrolman's car. However, the ground erupts, knocking Kaylee out of the open door and onto the raft. A huge glowing tentacle shoots out from the ground and assaults her. She manages to get on top of the car and, finding two gas cans on the rear rack, uses them to set one of the large tentacles on fire.
Kaylee, Chanda, and Jonah lock themselves in the car as the creature's tentacles flail and bash at them. Eventually, the attacks stop; in the silence, Kaylee and Chanda see that Jonah has died from his injuries. The two girls cry for the loss of their friends and fall asleep huddled together.
In the morning, the girls are awakened by a man (Michael Huntsman), who taps on the glass and asks them if they are still alive. Kaylee and Chanda note, incredulously, that the creature is gone. They walk across the sand together, traumatized, as the man calls for an ambulance.
In a closing shot, the creature, revealed as an enormous jellyfish, is seen under the water, faraway and headed towards another beach full of people.

Tags: violence

Review:
I watched it from beginning to end.I didn't have high expectations of the movie but the acting was good.No cardboard wooden acting.Its definitely NOT the worst movie of 2015.Talk about hyperbole.A group of young adults are trapped on a beach where something deadly has spawned overnight in the sand..There is some gore,not a lot.Its positively funny at times not because of cheese factor but because of some of the characters.Think Cabin Fever.The plot is thin but I watched it just to see who would survive.It tries to be more intelligent than it is but at the same time if you have a sense of humor..it makes light of itself at the right times too.I laughed out loud at a couple scenes.I really enjoyed The Sand,although it fails to be The Ruins or Don't Blink.If you like those movies you'll enjoy The Sand.Five stars for an enjoyable viewing experience..
And if you do that, it is a fun little flick.It is a B movie with minimal budget, minimal special effects, filmed in one location and with a cast of unknowns and still it has an interesting premise.I see it as a homage to the 50's man-in-a-rubber-suit monster film.
The first movie I thought of when watching this was Blood Beach(1980) which is similar with a hint of Sand Sharks(2011).
People would have wondered what's going on watching them film this because seeing them trying different ways to cross the sand without touching it was funny like using surfboards and inflatable rafts plus the sand would suck them in after chewing for a bit.
I did like the premise of "something is in the sand", because it reminded me of those 50s horror-SF movies, even the premise is hard to take seriously.
(but hey, that's why so many of us love these movies)."The Sand" isn't a masterpiece of course, nor is it a good horror movie, but it offers some level of entertainment.
Speaking of characters, there's nothing special, they are your usual horror cannon fodder, except the two characters: the fat black guy who's stuck in trash bin for the entire movie and the "oblivious to everything" cop.
No matter how cheap or bad looking it is, everyone's come to see it and the worst thing is if you grace us with CGI and no monster.
Was this a training video on how to take an absolutely horrid idea for a movie, hand it over to a screenwriter and watch the bad idea get even worse?
When it comes down to special effects and you only have 5 bucks left to spend, buy a super value meal at mcdonalds and sit at your computer for the time it takes to eat it with a software program downloaded for such purpose ad read the FAQs. After that hour you WILL be able to do better then they did in this movie.
Plot, touch the sand, it eats you and not in the fun, campy way that it did in "Blood Beach".
But there was just something about the movie's cover with the tentacle that was alluring and interesting, and that made me actually sit down to watch this 2015 horror movie.Naturally I didn't have much of any expectations to the movie, because I had never heard about it prior to actually finding the movie.With this being your typical late-teen / young adult horror movie, then you can expect pointless and tacky nudity, which totally doesn't serve the movie in any way."The Sand" (aka "Killer Beach") actually starts out well enough and doesn't waste any time in establishing a backstory or such.
But still, it does look adequate enough, and it is much better than the special effects in many other horror movies.They actually had some fair acting talents in the movie.
It should be said that people in the movie were actually doing good jobs with their given roles and characters.Writers Alex Greenfield and Ben Powell actually came up with an interesting concept for the plot and script.
And I will say that the storyline was original, so that was a nice and fresh approach.The most disappointing aspect to the movie, aside from the questionable CGI effects, was that you had to wait almost to the very end of the movie before tentacles started to emerge from the sand.
However, I will say that the fluorescent tentacle was really worth the wait, because that was cool and looked good.The atmosphere of the movie was good, and there was a real sense of dread and endangerment to the young people marooned on the beach.All in all, then I actually found "The Sand" to be an adequately entertaining movie, though it is hardly the type of movie that you will watch more than a single time - provided that you actually manage to sit through it the first time.
Further into the night some kids find some large cocoon-type thing.The next morning the beach is pretty empty except for one girl who's topless on a bench, two kids who are in lifeguard tower, three kids in a car and one guy is stuck in trash container.When topless girl steps into the sand, filaments grow out of it and she's sucked into the sand.
In some poor and bizarre editing/directing choice, at the very same time some other guy from the car is also attacked by the sand as he's trying to make his way out of the car.
It's near the end when finally there's some progress.The Sand is then a low-budget horror thriller, with uneven performances, cheesy but not horrible CGI effects, a script with a good concepts but that runs out of ideas.
The problem is that given the main idea and the low budget, the movie should have been more fun and campy instead it takes itself too seriously.
This film has CGI that seems better off as SyFy, TV movie material.
There's parts where it looked like unfinished, horribly placed CGI tentacles, as well as gore, and blood.
The CGI was literally like recycled SyFy material half the times, the film makes us sit through the characters making some of the stupidest decisions, in some of the most obvious of situations, leading to heavy disappointment, and even anger at some points.
The actors are quite likable (most of them anyway), making it tough to watch them bite the dust and my biggest plus was the fact that they acted like REAL PEOPLE.
On the down side, the CGI sucked (there's not much of it though) and the story would veer into 90210 levels of drama at times (is now really the right time to talk about who banged who?)The Sand is an easily digestible horror flick, short and fun to watch on a weekend if the genre mood strikes you..
I had heard that it was bad but never had a problem with bad movies I gave it a try and I must say, this is the worst 2015 flick I've seen so far.The story is laughable, the acting is below zero and that could have made it a so bad it becomes a good movie but once the effects came in this becomes pure trash.
Not worth picking up, better go for the real stuff, Blood Beach from 1980.Gore 0/5 Nudity 0,5/5 Effects 0/5 Story 0/5 Comedy 0/5.
As long as the acting is tolerable and the plot is decent, I can look over a cheesy monster or being able to tell it had a low budget.
If I really enjoy a movie, I'll watch it numerous times after I find it.
They're three movies I desperately want Hollywood to remake and with a budget, with real stars, a genuine script and ABSOLUTELY NO CGI!!
There's this creature that lives under the sand on a popular beach and anyone that wanders onto the beach gets slowly sucked down, slower than quick sand and more devastating as it appears they're being eaten as they hopelessly gets pulled down to their doom.With a right budget, NOOOO CGI and a grander scale, a remake might work and be 10x more effective than the no-budget Blood Beach 1980s movie was.
Once awaken, the hungover models (well, all-but one nerd) realize quickly the sand is somehow alive and any direct contact does not end well.So, most of the movie is them screaming at each other, creating drama that's totally pointless and frustrating to the viewer and for them to get to safety from one un-sandy place to another.
With such bad CGI and shallow characters, it was refreshing to see them sometimes actually acting like real-life humans would.It's a total B-movie and ironically, looks worse than Blood Beach at times due to the horrible, dime-priced computer graphics.
However, I want to present a different point of view that some readers may understand my opinion and appreciate seeing this film in a different light.I stumbled on this movie when I was browsing around various horror movie lists, not knowing anything about it and having spent most of the day marathon watching bad horror movies.
Now, I personally love watching bad horror movies of all types and quality.
It's kind of a hobby for my wife and I to watch several bad horror movies in a row, usually as background noise while we do other things.
The movie wastes very little time in introducing the danger element of being surrounded by killer sand.
The rest of the run time is dedicated to watching the group try to escape their situation, as several people are picked off by the sand.
Now I know this movie doesn't have a deep complex plot or anything like that, but I still want to avoid spoilers.This is definitely a "bad" horror movie, but its the kind of bad that you can just love to put on for a few hours and enjoy every minute of it.
Most of the time the characters are like-able, their actions make sense, and the acting is actually surprisingly good.
The special effects are mostly believable and are quite good for a low budget trashy horror film.
This isn't going to blow your mind like or anything but it wont feel like it was done by a group of college students in a backyard like some bad horror movies do.This movie stood out from the others I had watched in this marathon in that it was the only movie that drew me in so much I stopped what I had been doing and actually gave the film my full attention.
I enjoyed it so much that I think I will watch it again in the near future with my wife, since I know she will enjoy it just as much as I did.Now even with all the good there is of course a list of flaws in the movie.
If you enjoy watching "bad" horror movies or any kind of low budget monster horror / sci-fi horror / thriller, then you should definitely give this movie a chance.
Don't have high expectations or a serious mind set and you can't go wrong here.TL/DR : If you love watching bad horror movies then this is the movie for you.
THE SAND is, in essence, a film version of that 'floor is lava' game you used to play as a kid (you know, where you and your friends - or just you if you had no friends) weren't allowed to touch the floor because you'd die, so you had to clamber over furniture and jump a lot.
This single location movie sees them trying to figure out a way to escape without being eaten by a tentacled nasty.This film's connections with the 1980s monster movie BLOOD BEACH are numerous, although it's much lower key and smaller scale, unsurprising given the lack of budget.
The acting is pretty bad and the CGI effects are really terrible (worse even than in an Asylum film) but THE SAND offers mild suspense all the way through and you can certainly do a lot worse..
A group of twenty-somethings party the night away on the beach only to wake up the next day to discover that a ravenous multi-tendrilled creature lies hidden beneath the sand, waiting to devour them.The Sand draws inspiration from an awful lot of movies, the most obvious of which is Blood Beach (1980), which bore the memorable tag-line 'Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water - you can't get to it.".
The problem is that The Sand isn't as good as any of the films it so closely resembles (not even Splinter).As soon as one of the characters insists that all mobile phones are to be put in a bag, out of reach, while the friends party hard on the beach, it is abundantly clear that this film is going to be bereft of clever ideas or originality.
It's not a painful watch, the hot babes in bikinis ensuring that there is always something to please the eye, but as a horror film it is definitely a disappointment, with zero tension or scares and some really bad CGI (for both the creatures appendages and the gore)..
Awakening the morning after a beach-party, a group of teens find that the sand around them contains a vicious, unseen creature that pulls them underneath the beach and tries to find a way of stopping the curious creature in order to get away alive.This here was an incredibly fun and enjoyable effort.
It has numerous scenes of the group getting stuck in the sand and then getting pulled under by the fine tentacles poking up to attack them, and the main sequences that stand out are the first few encounters where they don't know it's there as this pops off plenty of great deaths that really let their quick-strike ability and ruthlessness in attacking them are great fun.
Just when you thought it was safe to watch a movie about killer sand....
Because of this, the result is the worst tropes these films have to offer -- Stale, unlikeable characters, generic (and probably ad-libbed) dialogue, nonsensical behavior (Hey, let's bring that big, slimy egg thing back to the party!!!!) and (for the most part) atrocious CGI in lieu of any attempts at practical effects...
This movie is so awful it makes you cringe the entire time, don't waste your time watching this film.
BOTH concepts are way over-used and played out at this point.As the movie goes on, I promise you, you will find yourself actually CHEERING for whatever the hell is in the sand eating people because the actors are really that annoying.
One by one they get eaten leaving only the dumb jock, his girlfriend, and the chick he "cheated" on her with.I'm going to assume that at the end of this crap fest that the jock died, because he was just sitting there with his eyes wide open and the girls walked away unharmed since whatever was in the sand decided to leave that beach and head to another......PLEEEAASSEE DON'T MAKE A SEQUEL TO THIS GARBAGE!!!!!!!I only gave this thing a 1 because I couldn't give it a 0.
The film Blood Beach had a very good advertising campaign and looked like an interesting concept, but went in a strange direction.
It happens to me a lot, a potentially cool horror comes along and it has a cool concept then just takes it in a direction that I just do not care for and I end up being disappointed.The story has a party at the beach where no cell phones are allowed and lots of drinking and general spring break things are happening.
So the group figures there is some creature lurking under the sand and they find the edge where it can't get them, but getting there is going to take all their wits, but they spend a bit too much time discussing relationships...The end of the movie reveals that the creature is basically a large jellyfish that hatched from an egg that the party goers are shown carrying onto the shore.
Honestly, how I would have played it is tiny flesh eating organisms in the sand rather than one big monster that can pull a fat guy through a garbage can, but can't pierce a raft or gets stopped by shoes!So the film had some cool moments and a couple of cool kills.
If you remember Blood Beach (1980), a sparky little thriller about a beach that eats people, you'll know exactly what to expect.It could have done with more editing: It's a miracle that I got past the beach party at the start - it seemed like a bad memory from the 'eighties.
That said, if you read the plot summary and look at the stills, you know a lot about the movie already.
There is a boyfriend issue that doesn't distract us from the sand eating people with blood and gore effects.Acting could have been better, likewise for the dialogue.
And the small factor that they have to contend with a seemingly carnivorous beach that devours anything with a heartbeat that touches the sand.......With a minimal cast, pretty ropey special effects, and a concept that reminds one of the eighties horror Blood Beach, The Sand shouldn't be as much fun as it is, but when the cast put in some surprising performances, and the poor acting crew are killed off, there is just something that is likable about this b-movie fodder.So the aim of the game is to stay off the sand, or else the demons of bad CGI will come and get you, so the majority of the film is seeing the six members of the cast shout at each other, discover things about themselves and the sand, and us guessing who will be next.We have three in the car, two in the outlook post, and a fat guy in a bin, with an appendage scrawled in his face.