Nightmare Beach (1989)

Love a good slasher, and this is one of the few 80's slashers that has eluded me for so many years (mainly cause I couldn't find an affordable way to watch it).  Italian produced with shlock director Umberto Lenzi attached yet in reality he mainly just supervised the film but still credited in most places as the director.  Nightmare Beach which was also released in the US under the title Welcome to Spring Break is set on the beaches of some unspecified place in Florida, where the bodies start piling up soon after the electrocution of a biker gang's leader.  Was my search for this one worth it?  Nope!

 Half the movie is random spring break footage

The movie can be mistaken for some kind of bad 80's beach comedy or something with the amount of beach footage that is shown.  There is no mistake the movie takes place during spring break as it hammers it over your head repeatedly with random shots of beaches, swimming, drinking, wet t-shirt contests, more beaches, fun, and so on over and over again between every scene of actual plot.  The opening scene is of the execution of the biker gang leader Diablo, who leads the Demons.... clever.  But then you get a good 20 minutes of spring break fun before the killing even kicks in!

He's behind me isn't he?

Our main characters are all incredibly dull, but it's a slasher and we kinda don't often care about them, but damn they are some serious personality sucking sponges.  Everyone in the movie really is just phoning it in, heck the victims of the killer barely react in his presence.  The killer himself wears a standard motorcycle outfit with closed helmet, a look that's been used in many other slashers like Night School, Nail Gun Massacre, Strip Nude for your Killer, and more.  Nightmare Beach's killer does have a gimmick at least, in which he mainly kills by electrocution, cause you know that's how the gang leader at the start gets killed.... shocking!  The killer even rides around on a motorcycle that is also a mobile electric chair, which is totally practical!  When not on the bike the killer always is lucky to find some powerful electrical wires nearby somehow.  The kills are sorta gory but also pretty laughable with how obvious the transition is to a dummy being set on fire for each of the the kills.  But our killer is anything but menacing, and as already mentioned even the actors barely react to him.  Characters don't even try to run or fight back most of the time, they just kind of stand there and let themselves get killed or don't even realize what is going on.  The movie is boring as heck, and when your kills can't even get a little excitement going, you got a serious problem.

 

Press 'A' for stealth kill

Slasher films aren't big on plot typically and all I ask is that it at least feels cohesive.  Nightmare Beach for the most part feels like two different movies going on at the same time with our main characters during spring break dealing with a missing friend and discovering all kinds of weird locals, including the most obvious and overly corrupt cops ever.  John Saxon plays the local sheriff of course, cause John always plays the cop!  He's not a very good cop and is not even subtle about how corrupt he is.  In between scenes of our main couple of characters bumbling around during spring break and getting into trouble with the locals, our serial killer biker pops up and kills complete random strangers who have nothing to do with the overall plot.  It isn't till the very end that it all comes together and our main characters come face to face with the killer!  And to spoil how it all goes, the killer accidentally kills himself.  After everything our two main leads literally just run away from the killer who while chasing after them dies in a motorcycle accident.  Our lead characters didn't do anything to cause the accident, the killer literally just has an oopsie.  It sounds comical but it's not even that as you just kinda raise an eyebrow at how absurd this whole thing was.  Now there is a plot twist reveal of course which I won't go into, but anyone will guess the killer within minutes of his introduction.

 TOASTY!

Nightmare Beach is just bad, it really has nothing going for it.  It may not be bottom barrel crap like many SOV slashers, but it's still just not very good at anything.  The movie wastes too much time on it's boring leads and their spring break, while also just giving us a forgettable killer.  We don't even get any really good kills in this, nor is the gore anything special.  This is one of the harder to find slashers for some reason, but it's totally not worth your time in seeking it out.