A Masterpiece!

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

The Stuff. The Blob (again.) And...Blood Beach. What do those three movies have in common? They're three movies I desperately want Hollywood to remake and with a budget, with real stars, a genuine script and ABSOLUTELY NO CGI!! I grew up on those B-movies. Scared the utter crap out of me when I was a yute. The Stuff just flat-out needs a remake and I can see it being very plausible and relevant nowadays. The Blob already had one 1988 remake, but they made it too alien-like and today I fear the whole thing would be CGI - SAD. And that leaves: Blood Beach.Blood Beach was this early 80s horror B-movie to capitalize on the JAWS-phase. It's bad, oh, it's so bad, BUT, the premise to a then-7-8 year old, was horrifying. 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. 2015's The Sand listens to none of this advice.That said, The Sand isn't the worst movie for what it was. Yeah, it's bad, and it had an overuse of the absolutely terrible CGI (See? NOOO CGI, jerks,) but it's nowhere as bad I thought it would be and I made it all the way through the semi-remake of Blood Beach.In a Cloverfield 1-type opening of an evening beach party of youths, many partiers pass out on the beach as probably intended. Oops, only the next morning, most of them are gone and the only surviving twenty-somethings are those who unintentionally fell asleep on objects above the sand. 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. The actual clever thing is, for the most part, they do some actual believable stunts and objectives and I actually admired multiple actions taking place at one time. 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. But, it's actually tense at times and you do root for some of them to live. It's harmless and if you have 80-some-odd minutes for some 80s-monster-nostalgia, this might work for you.***Final thoughts: Still, I'm getting so frustrated with Hollywood and probably Sharknado parts 1-19 and all those other fifteen-cent CGI films. Please, there are plenty of talented practical effect heroes out there to make a genuine monster movie. I wish for once, they would utilize these talented FX people vs for the quick buck of these talentless computer generated image nerds. Bah!

I love to read reviews that give something like this more than one star, and try to picture the reviewer. Usually, Sloth from the Goonies comes first to mind.It's really pointless to try to separate these ScFy channel "films", they're all pretty much the same- inane plots, horrifically amateurish acting, static cinematography (endless reaction shots to something offscreen), jarringly different film formats from scene to scene, etc, etc, ad nauseum. This one was particularly silly and suspenseless, laughable special effects.It was awful.

This has a similar plot and layout to Blood Beach and also to a (I think,) twilight zone short in which swimmers in a lake are attacked by a floating bin sack.If you consider being able to shriek to be good acting then this is for you.There is absolutely no subtlety to either the acting or the plot and it is difficult to understand how a director could ever think this little opus was worth anything other than the trash can.Which makes me think that these rubbishy films are simply a tax avoidance scam – make a film that sucks but pay yourself a great fee so the tax on your finance is avoided but you still reap rewards. Plus the junk film gets rented out to cable and late night channels and you have an ongoing royalty income. Only after a person has watched the film do they realise that they just wasted 90 mins of their time.

Surprisingly entertaining and well acted, The Sand isn't hardcore horror. There isn't a load of blood and guts, but when I was about 9, I saw a movie like this one called Blood Beach. That stuff was traumatizing and this one, brought back nice memories of that scary movie. 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. They handled things the way I would've which made it easier to root for them. 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.