Neither the Sea nor the Sand is a great movie title, isn't it? Unfortunately it's definitely not a great film. Dull, poorly written and suffering from a really bad case of shitty and overtly intrusive early '70s music... well, it's pretty clear why this has been all but forgotten, only to be exhumed by streaming services in their endless and unholy hunger for #content.
Annabelle (Susan Hampshire) is sightseeing along the Jersey island coastline when she runs into Hugh Dabernon (Michael Petrovitch) - a handsome, brooding, slightly douchey lighthouse keeper who proceeds to court her with juvenile philosophy and bargain-rack morbidity. These days she would laugh him off as a pretentious goth git, but I guess back then it was new and interesting. Susan is unhappy with her marriage, and after a short chaste courtship she decides to stay in Jersey with Hugh.
The first half of this movie is basically these people hooking up. Some of it is cute, including a couple of well made, non-gratuitous sex scenes, some of it is shitty, but either way at forty-five minutes it still feels too long.
Then, while fooling around (non-sexually) in a remote Scottish beach, Hughie just... drops dead. This is a very effective scene, and Susan Hampshire really gets to shine here; she gets a lot of mileage just from looking desperate and/or dejected, using her very expressive eyes to great effect. Hugh's soon pronounced dead from a heart attack by a country doctor with a brutal bedside manner.
Later that night, Hugh comes back to Anna. At first it looks like it's going to be a haunting, but nope - everyone else can see Hugh just fine. He doesn't talk now, and is listless and barely responding to stimulus, but he follows Anna around like a puppy and seems alive enough.
Once they return to Jersey, though, it's quickly established that Hugh is very much not alive. Anna has somehow returned only the semblance of life to her beau, basically turning him into an amorous zombie (it could be argued that Hugh's love drove him to return, but the actor doesn't really sell it as well as Anna.)
And here the movie seems to run out of ideas on what to do next; there's a murder, because there need to be some stakes, I guess; there's some attempts to cast doubt on whether what's animating Hugh is indeed Hugh or something else. There are scenes where Anna needs to mislead the police as to what's happening, and another where Anna is in denial and goes shopping... that sort of thing.
But it's very clearly just pointless waffling. It ends how it needs to end; Not much in the way of surprises, but at least it ties into some of the bullshit Hugh spouts at the beginning - a solid ending to a movie that is too often on very shaky ground.
Even at an hour and a half the movie is bloated and full of pointless scenes. The dialog is often really bad - this is another one of those movies where people often just don't talk or act like human beings; this kills the first half of the movie, where it needs to get you to care about these foolish young things' budding love affair, and introduces some unintended humor into the second half with random bits like how Hugh's brother reacts to his sibling's death, or even worse, with a character played by Michael Craze who I guess is just there to (unsuccessfully) introduce some tension; this guy is so fucking hilariously inappropriate that I can't fathom what the scritpwriters were thinking of when they wrote him in.
Most of the cast seems to be just British TV actors, and except the delightful Scottish Landlords, no one has the chops to elevate the material. Hugh's actor in particular needed to be a lot more charismatic to make the character interesting or fun to watch, especially later on when he barely gets any dialog. Susan Hampshire is a honorable exception and deserves some recognition for making some of her dialog actually work.
The photography can also be quite nice, with lots of lovely shots of dreary British coastland. Other than that it's a pretty pedestrian-looking movie. Don't expect much in the way of scares, carnage, or zombie makeup even when Hugh is supposed to be decomposing. And the music... oh god, it's terrible. Just fucking horrible pseudo-hippy shit.
It's important to state that even though the film chickens out and there's no actual on-screen necrophilia, if you choose to take the movie literally (and why wouldn't you?) Zombie Hugh does bone Anna telepathically from a distance, replaying previous sex scenes in their minds. Psychic zombie sex! If there's any reason why this film should be remembered, that's as good as any.
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