Ultimately, Beneath is better than your average Roger Corman clone because it is more serious than trivial.
60
Time Out
Time Out
Although Fessenden does fine work shooting his equivalent of Lifeboat, the movie’s surface is often rough. Yet the title doesn’t just refer to what lurks in the lake’s still water. It’s a guide to where Beneath’s substance lies, the acid heart inside its plastic chest.
60
Village VoiceMichael Atkinson
Village VoiceMichael Atkinson
Beneath may be an earnest goof, but any intended irony is so spiked with rainy-day-matinee movie love that the result is an oddly guileless horror exercise, unscary but rather adorable.
50
Slant MagazineEd Gonzalez
Slant MagazineEd Gonzalez
Its stance toward every dipshit slasher and creature-horror flick that's come before it never feels less than casually hostile.
50
The DissolveNoel Murray
The DissolveNoel Murray
As routine and undercooked as Beneath’s one-wet-corpse-after-another plot is, the movie is still breathtakingly beautiful at times, with compositions and color tones that resemble a high-class fashion-magazine layout circa 1965.
Though the young actors...are appealing enough, you keep waiting for a boatful of humor to come along and rescue them. The whole film is a campy put-on, right? Apparently not.