Peter Benchley swaps whitefish for calamari in this watchable TV mini-series event. The Beast is a flat-packed psychopathic animal thriller even idiots can assemble; unexplained events leave an ethnically homogenous coastal town in terror, the loathsome officials are in denial, all the dumbest people get it in the first act, and the humble hero does his life's work in one evening. This may sound drab, but much like flat-packed Scandinavian furniture made from sawdust it is also aesthetically pleasing and functional. William Petersen is charming and believable as a sullen fisherman but nobody's netting a Saturn award on this expedition.
