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Blood Sand AKA The Sand (2015) answers an age-old question: how much of a bad movie will a man sit through as long as there are pretty bikini-clad girls in each shot?
Answer: all the way through to the copyright notice… just in case the bikini girls return for a post-credit scene…
Let’s give Blood Sand waaaaaaay more attention than it deserves because Brooke Butler, Cynthia Murell, Meagan Holder and Nikki Leigh wear bikinis like it’s their job.
Blood Sand makes a good double feature with Bait 3D, which Stark recently reviewed. Both films have an ocean motif, combined with a The-Floor-Is-Lava theme, as our heroines struggle to avoid a threatening beastie.
Get James Gunn on the phone. We have found Supergirl…
Blood Sand
Many of you boomers remember Blood Beach (1980), which had an excellent poster depicting beach sand eating a bikini-clad sunbather. I reviewed Blood Beach here, but The Last Movie Outpost Implosion of 2022 erased it from existence.
(Sort of…it lives on in my files; mayhap I will resurrect it one day.)
Despite their obvious similarity, Blood Sand and Blood Beach are quite different. Blood Beach tries to make itself a police procedural. David Huffman bumbles about attempting to solve the case while Jon Saxon passes through on his way to Battle Beyond the Stars.
Blood Sand, however, stays on the beach. Because that’s where the bikinis are…
The movie starts with a bunch of douchebag college students throwing a beach bash, montage-style. It somehow makes every partygoer detestable. They motivate me to yell at clouds and hike my pants up to my chin.
Thankfully, the party ends, and a group of hungover characters wake up on the beach the next morning. Everyone else has disappeared.
The revealed conundrum is that anyone who touches the sand gets eaten by bad CGI spaghetti. Did I say “bad” CGI? I meant “catastrophic” CGI. It probably doesn’t achieve PlayStation One levels. It’s more like Atari 2600 levels…
Fortunately, the bikinis are all practical effects done in camera.
Get me some Ragu!
Sandy Bloody Sandy
The first girl eaten by CGI spaghetti is topless and vomiting. You might think vomiting makes a topless girl less magnetic to the eye. Surprisingly, no. This is the type of phenomenon that makes women lament and men nod knowingly.
Now that the rules are established, Blood Sand becomes an exercise in how will the rest of the characters escape the beach?
With logic and teamwork, right?
Kind of…at times…
Honestly, it’s not that important. The reason being: bikinis.
Aside from the bikinis, the other secret weapon this low-budget, SyFy Original wannabe wields is that if you look at it cross-eyed and squint, you will see a Lovecraftian tale that leaves dreary New England behind for sunny California.
That’s kind of fun. Because — catastrophic CGI aside — the beastie is frightening and, frankly, neat in its simplicity. Blood Sand is kissing cousins with The Blob. In fact, you could easily improve Blood Sand by one-and-a-half stars if you set it in the early 1960s as an Annette Funicello-style beach/horror film hybrid.
I would watch the crap out of that movie with zero irony.
This sort of period setting also solves the smartphone problem, which Blood Sand addresses by having everyone lock their phones in a car trunk so no one can record any embarrassing debauchery. You know, like the movie…
A 1960s setting is a better solution. Plus, the bikinis could have polka dots.
Hey, everyone, watch me recreate the opening of Lethal Weapon!
First Blood Sand
Blood Sand runs a scant 85 minutes, and you can tell they struggle even with that. The characters don’t have much to do except look concerned, yell at each other and situate themselves for maximum bikini appreciation angles.
I imagine these actresses ate a lot of carrots with water a month before filming.
Of course, the ladies try to get the phones out of the car trunk. Big mistakes and minor discoveries are made. One character becomes exasperated with being stuffed in a garbage can for the length of the film.
But when Blood Sand is on the verge of completely running out of steam, Jamie Kennedy shows up and tries to be funny as a security guard with a superiority complex.
I did not find Kennedy funny, however. This is no slight on Kennedy. I like Kennedy. It is because his character reminded me of Stephen Duxbury, an apartment building security guard who murdered one of his building’s tenants.
Sometimes I have criminal interrogations on in the background when I work. I enjoy their cat-and-mouse aspect as the interrogator tries to catch the bad guy, and the bad guy gets trapped by his own words. Duxbury’s interrogation is a textbook example of how guilty people cannot shut up when trying to appear innocent.
But I digress…back to the bikinis…
My contact specifically asked for a “bag” of M&Ms as payment, not a “fun pouch” of M&Ms. Whatever…it’s fine. Let’s shoot this sucker.
Bloodwork Sand
Isaac Gabaeff directed Blood Sand. Previously, he worked as a set dresser on Boardwalk Empire. Alex Greenfield, who works in TV and on video games, wrote the screenplay, along with Ben Powell, who also has a scant list of credits.
Again, all of that is irrelevant because of bikinis. The girls of Blood Sand include:
Brooke Butler, who wears a red top with a pair of Daisy Dukes. Her character likely made the Daisy Dukes herself from a regular pair of jeans. She shows that kind of resourcefulness and strength. When she holds her boyfriend’s hand, you get the sense their relationship is deeper than looking good while walking into parties.
They probably also share Tik-Toks.
Brooke has worked mostly on TV, appearing in Ozark and Creepshow episodes.
Cynthia Murrell wears a standard bikini. No Daisy Dukes for her. Her character is a traditionalist. I don’t think she has even had any plastic surgery. Good for her. That’s like bringing a corked bat to a baseball game.
Murrell was the only one of the girls I recognized, but I am hard pressed to know from what. She was on an episode of How I Met Your Mother, but I never watched that show. I have too much Norman Bates in me.
I Vant To Suck Your Blood Sand
Megan Holder pairs a jean skirt with her bikini top. Holder has the most cardboard looking bikini. It could probably stop arrows with that kind of robust molding.
Holder appeared on the Monarch TV series. In Blood Sand she is a hoe who comes between Brooke and her boyfriend. The boyfriend is played by a poor man’s Austin Butler. We could look up his name, but since he doesn’t wear a bikini, he is not important.
Finally, Nikki Leigh is the topless vomiting girl. She was on Two and a Half Men once. If you would like to send condolences, contact her via Instagram.
Real talk: Leigh is not an exceptional vomiter, but they didn’t give her much to work with. It’s like they gave her a slice of banana to expel and that was it.
Then again, maybe her character was anorexic. We can’t rule it out. Blood Sand is the kind of movie where performers probably wrote 100-page biographies of their characters.
This photo is representative of my inner horizon…
Blood Sand
Look, Blood Sand is not good. But, like Bait 3D, it is watchable. Chalk it up as a guilty pleasure. Maybe it is because it reminded me of playing The Floor Is Lava as a kid that made me softhearted toward it. I played that game many times with my two best friends: a mummified hand named Handy and a rusty syringe named Pokey.
It helps that Blood Sand has a bland, but passable, ending. I like downer endings as much as the next guy, but downer endings used to be the exception rather than the norm. I’m tired of the trend in modern horror to give every film a downer ending.
Meanwhile, no explanation is given for the beastie. That is fine. We can imagine enough about it with what information is given.
Blood Sand is no day at the beach, but it doesn’t suck as much the sucking sand for which it is named. It brings the bikinis; all you need to bring is the beer…
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