Mayhem Results When ‘Beast’ Surfaces

Peter Benchley creates stories about sea creatures gobbling up bad people and nameless innocents before the murderous animals get nailed by likable heroes. A bricklayer lays bricks. Benchley has people die in the water. It’s his job.

One of Benchley’s jobs, titled “Beast,” has been turned into another job-like product for television, a two-part, four-hour epic mysteriously retitled “The Beast.” Even more mysteriously, Benchley didn’t write the teleplay. (That was J.B. White’s job.) And even more mysteriously, executive producer Benchley allowed many changes from page to screen, all of them pointless.

The task at hand is to tell a story of how a giant--no, humongous--squid and her family decide to consume anything in the water off of charming Graves Point, home to fishermen and vacationers and greedy politicians. People will vanish at sea, panic will gradually settle in, the politicians will dismiss the problem, the sea monster will knock off one sleazeball after another and the hero will reluctantly take control of the situation.

This is “Jaws 5,” only with tentacles instead of chompers.

In White’s script and Jeff Bleckner’s by-the-numbers direction, “The Beast” feels like an assignment carried out on orders from high up in the NBC command center: It’s a Stepford movie, which is the creepiest thing about it.

Certainly, William Petersen as Whip Dalton looks Stepfordized, astonishingly blank for a man watching his world cave in. Petersen, as a hood thrown down a mountain in “Mulholland Falls,” does more acting in one minute of that film than four hours here.

Glimmers of what could have been come from Charles Martin Smith, who eschews his past nerdy buddy persona and injects sly comedy into his role as a money-grubbing developer and harbor master. Missy Crider, as Whip’s daughter, delivers the only authentic emotions in this long, wet crawl toward the inevitable.

* “The Beast” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday and Monday on NBC (Channel 4).