That’s One Mean Mollusk

Just when you thought it was safe to eat a plate of calamari, NBC presents the giant squid thriller, “Peter Benchley’s ‘The Beast,’ ” airing Sunday and Monday.

William Petersen, Karen Sillas and Larry Drake star in the four-hour adaptation of Benchley’s 1991 bestseller about a mammoth mollusk that goes on a feeding rampage at a Washington seaside community.

The female squid, a.k.a. the Architeuthis dux, makes the killer shark of Benchley’s 1974 classic “Jaws” look like a pussycat. The feeding machine has a menacing beak, eight tentacles and two prehensile whips that feature numerous serrated circular suckers, each with a bony fang.

She’s hungry and she’s mad: “The Beast” goes on her human feeding frenzy because the fishermen have depleted the area’s once-rich food supply.

Benchley says it will be interesting to see if the “The Beast” will scare the living daylights out of TV audiences.

“Television is such a different medium [than film],” he says. “It’s a colder medium than film. Whether it can have the same kind of impact as ‘Jaws,’ I don’t know. I have never seen a TV movie or a show that has frightened me. Whereas the most frightening experience of my young life was seeing ‘Psycho’ [in the theaters].”

“The Beast” marks the first time one of Benchley’s novels has been produced for the small screen. Universal originally optioned it for a theatrical film but then decided Benchley’s script was too expensive to produce. “They got John Carpenter to do one and they deemed his too expensive,” says Benchley, who also is one of the executive producers. “So when NBC wanted to do it, they went to Universal and the movie division gave the project to the TV division. They hired J.B. White to turn it from a two-hour movie to a four-hour miniseries.”

Benchley actually went searching for a giant squid back in 1979 with a fisherman pal who is the basis for the character played by Petersen.

“He and I are old friends in Bermuda and we felt it would be fun to see if we could get one to the surface because no one had ever seen a live one before. The first time we went out we took cables--48 woven strands of stainless steel--down to 3,000 feet with hooks and lights and baits.”

They stayed out all night. Much to their disappointment, there wasn’t even a nibble. “When we brought the cables up the next day, we discovered they had been bitten off at 2,000 feet! I suddenly thought, ‘Gee. This is an interesting animal. We should have more acquaintance with him.’ We kept going and getting more equipment lost and damaged and beaten up. I don’t know what the first impulse was to turn it into a book, but it was based on, like, 12 or 15 years of looking for him.”

Earlier this year, Benchley relates, a group of New Zealand scientists managed to bring four giant squids to the surface. “They caught them in nets, but they were all dead by the time they hit the surface. The biggest ones, according to the papers, were 26 feet--relatively small. The biggest one ever documented, fully weighed and measured, was 55 feet long, also in New Zealand. When you get into less scientifically ascertained figures, the biggest one people accept is 72 feet.”

“The Beast,” Benchley says, has a strong environmental message: “Don’t mess with Mother Nature. If we start screwing around with a food chain, then you never know what can happen. You do something and the dominoes begin to fall. You have no idea what the ramifications will be.”

In fact, Benchley says, these mysterious creatures have attacked boats. “There are very few [incidents], but they have been really documented quite well,” he says. “Nobody knows what they will eat, really. It’s very hard to analyze stomach content--either the animals have been dead too long or the stomach was gone. But they are known to be cannibals. They are known to be utterly fearless. One squid scientist said memorably that it is the only Cephalopoda mollusk that knows vengeance. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s certainly a nice phrase.”

“The Beast” airs Sunday and Monday at 9 p.m. on NBC.