"Chupacabra: Dark Seas" is the type of movie reviewers hate to review. No, it's not that the title is a pain to spell out. It's that no thesaurus has enough adjectives for the word "awful" in it to cover an entire review.

This is more pitiful dredge from the Sci-Fi Channel, plain and simple, and there's hardly an explanation for its existence.

Doctor Pena (Giancarlo Esposito), a crypto zoologist specializing in the study of Chupacabras, has finally nailed a specimen. After capturing it and losing some men in the process, he only has one more step: Get it into the United States for study. Storing it on a cruise ship, two members of the loading crew open up the box containing the bloodthirsty beast, curious to see what's inside. What they have let loose is an almost indestructible creature that threatens everyone aboard.

Let's get it out of the way early. This movie is filled with blood. Buckets of it. In fact, they probably spent more on blood then they did on any of the actors. People get their faces ripped off, blood splatters onto walls repeatedly, and one pour soul lies on the cold metal floor with the other half of his body someplace else. I have to wonder what exactly this creature eats since the majority of the necessary bodily fluid ends up as decoration.

Director John Shepphird has absolutely no experience in this genre, though that probably wouldn't have made a difference. The only recognizable face is long-time actor John Rhys-Davis who played Gimli in the "Lord of the Rings." Either his entire payoff from those films is gone or he had some favors to pay back. There's little reason for him to be here otherwise.

The rest of the cast is simply awful, putting in ludicrous performances on every level. David Millbern plays an onboard thief and he should never be allowed to act again, ever, anywhere, for the rest of time. The US Navy comes onboard a bit into the film, complete with painted bicycle helmets (seriously). Either every one of them failed basic training miserably, or they simply like to fire their guns at blank walls and with civilians in the line of fire.

Logic is at a bare minimum. Most obviously, if you were going out to capture a mythical creature and have a chance, wouldn't you have a plan to get it back to the states? And why a cruise ship? And how does he know so much about this creature if it technically doesn't exist?

Though Rhys-Davis' character is supposedly a bright heroic captain (told to the audience in a brief and totally illogical moment of character development), he makes really stupid decisions. Why take everyone out of his or her safe cabins (where no one has been killed yet) to evacuate? Putting them all out as food is NOT going to win you any respect points.