The Beast of the Bering Sea is 100% Hilarity

SyFy had such great success with the shark craze that catapulted movies like Sharknado and Ghost Shark  that it decided to branch out to other horrifying things that live in the water. They searched long and hard until finally settling on: stingrays. But because stingrays aren’t really that scary, SyFy made them into blood-sucking, super-intelligent, flying “vampires of the sea.” The resulting movie is pretty damn hilarious.

The Beast of the Bering Sea follows a family of seafaring gold hunters. They have a rivalry with a seafaring mob-like group who are also after undersea gold. However, they are confronted by stingray-like creatures that attack them both in and out of the water. Teaming up with a marine biologist, the family manages to defeat the creatures before driving their boat off into the sunset.

The titular “beasts” are really hilarious. They’re shiny black things, so when they first attack it looks like the victim is struggling mightily with an aggressive raincoat. They kill by hugging their prey to death, they fucking FLY, and they explode at the drop of a hat when exposed to sun or poked with a sharp stick.

But the best part about these sea-vampires is that when they come on land, they stand on their hind…fins or something. We never get an actual look at how they’re standing upright, but they sure look SUPER silly doing it while hissing and growling with their “vampire” fangs

Then there’s the awful lines that turns horrified or angry statements into occasions for laughter. For instance, the marine biologist calls the beasts an “evolutionary triple threat” and all we could think of was these silly stingrays putting on a top hat and turning into the dancing frog from Looney Tunes.

And finally, the plot. Most of the movie consists of seafaring family + sea mob vs. vampires of the sea. Eventually all but three of the humans are killed as they fight the vampiric stingrays with such strategies as running around with heat lamps, taking a boat out to sea at night, and running them over with a dump truck.

The final, big confrontation consists of a bulldozer stirring up some ocean dust and lots of explosions. Then the movie just kind of….ends. There is no real downward action; it’s just suddenly over for no reason. We aren’t even sure if they vanquished all the sea vampires.

But it doesn’t really matter if there’s a real resolution because if you’re still watching by that point, you’re in it for the giggles and the movie has already delivered plenty on that score.