Rent Damn Sea Vampires! (2013)

Spoilers ... - Damn Sea Vampires! review by NP

It’s uncanny. Feisty, pretty Donna Hunter (Cassie Scerbo), who works with her dad and younger brother (they are Gold Hunters in the arctic) welcomes new deckhand Owen Powers (Brandon Beemer) with as much venom as she can muster – but he’s almost as pretty as she is! Turns out he’s a good guy as well, so one would consider it an inevitability they are destined for a long and fruitful life together. And yet to criticise such ‘cheesiness’ (cheesy: (a). Of poor quality; shoddy: a movie with cheesy special effects. (b). Vulgarly pretentious or sentimental: a cheesy romantic comedy) is proof of not understanding the point that it’s ‘cheese’ is entirely deliberate. Therefore, it is beyond criticism because it is supposed to be ridiculous.

I’ve never really understood this. A horror comedy that is neither horrific nor comedic, just hovering somewhere in between. You either go into a horror film wanting to enjoy it by laughing at it, or to invest in the story it is telling and go along with it. It’s impossible to go along with this film because the titular creatures, the Sea Vampires disturbed by the salvagers are adorably bad. Even the illustrations on publicity material depict them as being just as cartoon-like as they are on-screen. And yet the players are earnest and don’t play anything for laughs.

The creatures appear to loosely be based on stingrays, but with bulbous eyes and wide, frog-like mouths. For the hilarity of their every appearance, they are deadly beasts, killing Donna’s father as well as other peripheral characters. But not to worry too much – she and Owen are finding comfort in each other’s melancholy. It seems as if the ice maiden is about to be thawed out. So disturbing a race of killer jellies has its benefits!

The creatures are routinely defeated by grow-lights used by the local villain to cultivate marijuana (the swine), which is inventive, if nothing else. Ultimately, this film seems to have been produced to fit the ‘so bad its good’ criteria, which as an ambition, baffles me.