There’s a certain masochistic charm in sitting down to watch a Peter Benchley adaptation. Jaws was lightning in a bottle, The Deep was lightning in a soggy bucket, and The Beast—a two-part TV miniseries about a giant squid—is lightning in a burned-out toaster someone left in a rainstorm.
The year was 1996, the golden age of “event television” when networks tried to convince us that watching four hours of cheap special effects and overacting was a cultural necessity. ABC brought us The Beast, and like a bad seafood buffet, it left viewers bloated, regretful, and reaching for antacids.
Tentacle Trouble
The plot is straight from Benchley’s bargain bin: giant squid gets cranky because people are overfishing and also because some poor schmucks accidentally killed its baby. Result? The squid starts attacking boats, people, and the viewer’s attention span.
Our hero is Whip Dalton (William Petersen), a fisherman with a name that sounds less like a rugged seafarer and more like an off-brand Indiana Jones action figure. Whip is dragged into the squid shenanigans after finding a giant claw lodged in a dinghy. It’s supposed to be shocking, but the prop looks like it was borrowed from a low-rent seafood restaurant’s lobster tank.
Soon enough, marine biologist Dr. Herbert Talley (Ronald Guttman) arrives to explain that yes, it’s a squid, yes, it’s very big, and no, the production couldn’t afford to show it in daylight until the third act.
Characters: By Committee
The cast of The Beast feels like a focus group brainstormed them between commercial breaks:
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Whip Dalton (William Petersen): Gruff fisherman, beard stubble, single dad. Basically Quint if Quint had been neutered by network censors.
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Lt. Kathryn Marcus (Karen Sillas): Coast Guard officer, token “strong female lead.” Exists mainly to stand on boats and look worried while men argue about nautical strategy.
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Schuyler Graves (Charles Martin Smith): The harbor master whose name screams “corrupt politician” before he even opens his mouth. Spoiler: he’s corrupt.
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Osborne Manning (Denis Arndt): Sleazy theme park owner who wants to capture the squid alive. He’s essentially SeaWorld Voldemort.
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Lucas Coven (Larry Drake): Professional squid hunter. Yes, apparently that’s a job. I can only assume he works freelance between monster movies.
Every character seems to have wandered in from a different genre. Petersen thinks he’s in a gritty drama, Karen Sillas acts like she’s stuck in a Coast Guard recruitment ad, and Charles Martin Smith plays it like Gilligan’s Island but with embezzlement.
Pacing: Squid in Slow Motion
As a two-part miniseries, The Beast stretches what could’ve been a 90-minute monster flick into nearly four hours. That’s four hours of men in flannel yelling “Hard to port!” while the squid takes its sweet time deciding who to snack on next.
Whole scenes exist just to remind you that yes, this is adapted from a Peter Benchley novel, so please enjoy more dialogue about fishing quotas, corporate mergers, and sonar readouts than actual squid action. If you ever wanted Jawswithout the shark but with the riveting excitement of PowerPoint presentations about oceanography, this is your movie.
The Monster: Calamari on a Budget
Now let’s talk about the main attraction: the squid. Or rather, the idea of the squid, because most of the time you only see a blur of rubbery tentacles thrashing like an inflatable car dealership mascot on meth.
When we do get a good look, it’s… well, it’s there. A giant rubber prop, slimy and vaguely obscene, flailing around like someone dropped a pool toy into the wrong scene. This is supposed to inspire terror, but it mostly inspires hunger for fried calamari.
The squid has the same dramatic range as a sock puppet. It slaps boats, pulls people underwater, and apparently has a personal vendetta against William Petersen’s haircut. The climax features Whip setting his own boat on fire to blow the squid to kingdom come. This should be thrilling. Instead, it looks like a cooking demo gone wrong on Iron Chef: Cephalopod Edition.
Death Scenes: Insert Tentacle Here
Benchley knew how to kill people creatively in Jaws. The Beast, on the other hand, seems to have one idea: tentacle grabs someone, they scream, then disappear under the water in a geyser of bubbles and stage blood. Rinse, repeat, pad out to 180 minutes.
Highlights include:
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A submersible crew crushed like a tin can.
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A sleazy hunter pulled overboard mid-bad one-liner.
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Charles Martin Smith’s harbor master trying to row away, only to get tentacled like a piece of overcooked spaghetti.
The squid racks up an impressive body count, but after the third identical death, you start rooting for it to just eat the entire cast and roll credits early.
Themes: Eco-Horror With Homework
Like most of Benchley’s late-career work, The Beast tries to mix monster thrills with a stern lecture about mankind messing with nature. Unfortunately, the ecological message is delivered with all the subtlety of a Greenpeace pamphlet stapled to your forehead.
We get endless talk about how overfishing drove the squid to rage, how killing its baby made it vengeful, and how man’s hubris will be his undoing. All true, of course, but when you tune in for “giant squid attacks boats,” you don’t want to sit through Environmental Science 101.
Special Mention: The Dialogue
The script is full of clunkers that should be studied in writing classes as examples of how not to create tension. Gems include:
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“It’s not just a squid… it’s The Beast!”
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“If you kill her baby, she’ll never stop hunting you.”
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“I’ve seen calamari, but never like this!”
Every line sounds like it was translated from English into Australian into gibberish and back again.
The Ending: Squid vs. Fireball
The finale has Whip drenching his boat in fuel and lighting it up, turning the squid into the world’s most expensive calamari flambé. The explosion is big, loud, and about as convincing as a high school science project gone nuclear.
Of course, Whip and Kathryn escape in a Coast Guard helicopter, clutching each other while squinting into the middle distance. It’s the sort of ending that screams, “We ran out of budget—roll credits before the squid rebuilds itself in post-production.”
Final Verdict: Release It Back Into the Ocean
The Beast is a bloated, boring, four-hour calamity that proves even Peter Benchley could only strike gold once. The squid is laughable, the pacing is glacial, and the characters are as shallow as the tide pool they filmed in.
It’s not scary, it’s not thrilling, and it’s definitely not worth sitting through both parts unless you’re trapped on your couch by a giant squid and can’t reach the remote.
