Tag Sharks

• AKA:


• Director: Mark Atkins


• Writer: Joe Benkis (story), Cameron Larson (screenplay and story)


• Starring: Corin Nemec, Brooke Hogan, Vanessa Lee Evigan, Eric Scott Woods


• Run Time: 86 mins

Just when you thought you were safe out of the water

The island of White Sands is struggling to survive economically with tourists opting to swim elsewhere. The son of the mayor, sleazy Jimmy Green, heads back to town with the intention of saving the resort by turning it into some spring break haven, holding the Sandman Festival on the beach. Unfortunately, the decision to hold the festival coincides with a series of unexplained deaths on the beaches and the local sheriff is forced to close them with the fear that there is a dangerous animal on the loose. They soon learn that the cause of these deaths is a bunch of prehistoric sharks which are able to move through sand as easily as water. Not one to be deterred, Jimmy opts to press ahead with the festival with disastrous consequences.

Sand Sharks is every bit as goofy as it sounds and then some. The latest in a long, long line of low budget creature features from either The Asylum or The Sci-Fi Channel, if you’ve seen any of them then you’ll be in very familiar territory with this one. Truth to be told, they’re almost identikit films with only the title creatures being the variable between them. Having plundered the market for normal variations of sharks and crocodiles and totally worn out their welcomes with over-saturation, the studios mentioned now turn to prehistoric variations on the mentioned creatures. What it all boils down to is virtually the same type of killer shark film we’ve seen before, only with more of a Tremors feel to it than outright Jaws.

Spielberg’s classic is riffed on quite a lot throughout the film. Whether it just shows that the script writers are signalling where their influences lie or whether they’re just being lazy and rehashing scenes to fill out the time is another matter. The town hall scene, complete with a local ‘Quint’ who offers to kill the sharks, perhaps sums up the nature of the film best with its shameless lampooning. Jaws isn’t alone in having scenes poorly plagiarised, with the likes of Piranha and, bizarrely enough, Blood Beach also victimised. Not only is the entire film filled with scenes lifted from other films, there’s a pathetically goofy comic undercurrent running alongside. There are all sorts of one-liners, puns and sight gags strewn around and the script is full of general silliness – whether this helps the material or hinders it will entirely depend on your mindset before viewing. The feeble efforts at comedy fall flat and become somewhat embarrassing as the film progresses. Piranha 3-D this is not!

The preposterous abilities of these sharks are all rendered with the usual cheap CGI. At no point do you ever get the sense that they are swimming around in the sand – heck it’s even hard to believe that they exist in the same universe as the rest of the film. With no physical presence at all, the CGI looks tacky and what’s worse, it makes the actors look just as bad as they try to convey the sense of physicality. One of the scenes in the finale involving two characters, a confined space and the mother shark had me in stitches for all of the wrong reasons. The sharks change size from scene to the next, depending on what the story requires them to do. It’s just basic school boy error making but something which no one seems bothered with anymore. Sand Sharks is not the first, and it surely won’t be the last, of these films to vary the size of their creatures to accommodate things in the script – either change the script or cut the scene.

What’s worse is that the script has characters continually walk onto the sand when they have been standing on concrete paths. As these sharks are only too keen on leaping out of the sand like salmon, this is a bad decision on behalf of anyone who decides to venture out there. Trying to overcompensate for the lack of genuine shocks or moments of excitement, there’s a CGI gore overdose with all manner of entrails and severed heads being brought to life in not-so-believable computer-generated fashion.

It would be a poor review to not give brief mention to the cast, in particular Corin Nemec who plays the slimy Jimmy and chews every scene that he’s in. There’s a genuine spark in the scenes that he’s in but unfortunately it fails to ignite anyone else into life. It seems like a bit of effort went into developing his character though the same can’t be said for any of the other routinely-bland stereotypes and quite how anyone would believe Brooke Hogan to be some sort of scientist is beyond me.

Sand Sharks attempts to mix Jaws and Tremors with disastrously cheesy consequences. If you’re going to watch this, then chances are that you know what you’re about to get yourself for and are bracing for impact. Nothing anyone is going to say will make you change your mind.

• AKA:


• Director: Fred Olen Ray


• Writer: Clyde McCoy, Antonio Olivas, Fred Olen Ray


• Starring: John Schneider, Sarah Lieving, Tim Abell, Jerry Lacy


• Run Time: 87 mins

That’s one big ass shark!

An offshore drilling accident triggers the release of a giant prehistoric shark which can crawl on land or fly and proceeds to start terrorising the nearby community. Marine biologist Kat Carmichael is called in to investigate but runs into problems in the shape of oil executive Mr Wade.

I guess it’s the trend nowadays for monster movies to try and go more over-the-top than the last one. Since The Asylum’s terribly over-hyped snooze-fest Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus set the bar for outlandish physics-defying claptrap, it seems that every film made since featuring aquatic terrors has to try and outdo it in terms of ludicrousness and unbelievability. From Sharktopus featuring a shark-octopus hybrid which can walk on land to Mega Piranha with flying piranha fish taking out helicopters, sharks with two heads in 2-Headed Shark Attack and finally Sand Sharks with sharks than can ‘swim’ in sand, there seems to be no stopping this new wave of eye-rolling monotony. Super Shark isn’t going to buck that trend any time soon, rummaging through the bin and taking a page out of the nonsense book by having a mutant shark that can both fly and walk on land!

It’s quite hard to go into a film called Super Shark and not be surprised that it isn’t anything more than a complete turd. Story and common sense matters little to a film like this. It’s a film designed to showcase some bonkers set pieces featuring a shark that can walk on land and that’s primarily it. Human characters are there just to move along the plot until the next shark moment. Whatever cool ideas the writers thought they could get away, they throw in here without concern for how bizarre they are. Ever wanted to see a giant CGI walking shark battle a walking CGI tank on a sunny beach? Well here you are in all of its cartoon CGI glory. Seriously, the effects in this film are ridiculous. The shark has the usual CGI shark perma-grin slapped on its face and seems to be impervious to bullets (either that or the marksman in the tank was a lousy shot). Someone give me an animatronic or even rubber shark like the good old days – but I guess that would be considered boring now.

Part of the problem in this cycle of films, embodied by Super Shark, is that they have to outdo each other for fear that they’ll come off dull and “not as good as Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus.” So with the barrage of moronic set pieces comes a whole host of silly sub-plots and a sardonic script to keep the audience bombarded with as much inane nonsense as possible. There are a couple of sub-plots here which are all just treading water until the characters are fed to the shark at various points. Take for example the three lifeguards introduced at the beginning of the film. Possibly coming off as main characters, they are given a fair share of the screen time and a silly love-triangle plot before the shark has its way with them pretty soon after. It was a dead end sub-plot but given way too much time before proving itself to be a total waste. The script also litters the film with ridiculous dialogue that people can use as soundbytes because the writers know that it’s the only hope they have of getting people to remember it. You can bet your life that someone will call it “super shark” at some point.

Low budget exploitation horror veteran Fred Olen Ray is at the helm for this one and despite mocking some of his previous efforts, how I yearn for the cheap splatter effects and gratuitous nudity of some of his 90s outings. This is Olen Ray at his most neutered and puerile, barely raising a titter with plenty of bikini bimbos and having to endure the awfulness of the CGI shark during the set pieces. Where are the centrefolds he used to cast and then get them naked? Where are the cheap homemade blood patches and bargain basement limbs?

As is the case with these Sy-Fy/Asylum-esque flicks, there are one or two low rent actors taking the main parts for some form of name recognition. Sy-Fy stalwart John Schneider just can’t play a decent bad guy to save his life and his slimy oil executive character doesn’t even manage to raise a few pantomime boos. At least Sarah Lieving still looks as good as she did in Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus, filling out one of the aforementioned bikinis with aplomb. Couldn’t tell you anything about her character but she looked good doing whatever she was supposed to be doing.

Super Shark is yet another lame, one-trick watered down monster movie where the novelty value of the creature-of-the-moment soon outstays its welcome after the first sighting and then proceeds to go from idiotic set piece to the next. This genre has quite literally ‘jumped the shark’ now. Until next month at least and the next one of these films off the conveyor belt….

• AKA:


• Director: Brett Kelly


• Writer: David A. Lloyd, Trevor Payer (additional dialogue)


• Starring: Emanuelle Carriere, Christine Emes, Celine Filion, Angela Parent


• Run Time: 75 mins

Dinosaur from the deep

An oil company unwittingly unleashes a prehistoric shark from its icy prison, trapping a group of art thieves and female college students on an abandoned island where they must work together in order to escape.

Every once in a while, I’ll sit down and watch a film and proclaim it to be the single worst film I’ve ever seen. Go back through some of my old reviews and you’ll see this statement bandied around a fair bit. There can only be one ‘single worst film I’ve ever seen’ so the statement soon loses credibility if I keep repeating myself. So there will be no statements of grandeur for this review. I’ll just go on the record by saying that Jurassic Shark could be the worst film ever made. I’m not sure whether it’s even supposed to be a proper film or a joke that went too far.

More time was devoted to creating a kick-ass poster to trick punters into buying or renting the film than it seems actually went in to making it. Jurassic Shark is seventy-five minutes of incompetent filmmaking at its very best. Right from the opening scene featuring two girls who look to have been randomly picked up off the streets and talk like they were (they casually chat, not act, with each other as if the camera wasn’t there), the film never once manages to rise above looking and sounding like a college project which went viral. With a sparsely populated film, which is 90% set in the outdoors, you just get the impression that it was made by a group of friends in the middle of nowhere over some overcast weekend in July.

There’s little plot to the film and what little there is could easily be dissected to reveal the numerous lapses on logic and holes. But the small scope of the story, coupled with the general lack of people on camera, just gives the film a lightweight feel. A big oil company which has about three employees? A company which is drilling through ice in a lake which is warm enough to swim in? Thieves who plan to escape a heist on a rowing boat? I could keep going but there’s no point. I’m not trying to knock people who want to go out and make films for fun – I will knock them when their home movies get passed off as proper films and cause people like me to be out of pocket.

I wasn’t expecting the special effects to be up to much and I can’t say I wasn’t surprised. The best thing I can say is that the shark didn’t look as bad as I expected it to be. The same few frames of animation are repeatedly used whenever it attacks or is shown swimming around. There’s nothing exciting about the shark. It never once manages to instil fear, dread or any sense of physical menace. It’s just there. Yes it does eat a few characters but there’s nothing memorable about it. To say it was supposed to be a ‘Jurassic’ shark, the novelty value is non-existent and it could just as well have been any normal shark in a lake. The CGI effects typically vary in size from scene to scene and the  effects also commit the cardinal sin of not interacting properly with their physical environment (for example the dorsal fin doesn’t even cause a ripple or anything when it moves along).

Like a lot of these low budget creature features, the shark is given the boot for a lot of the running time, with the ‘script’ opting to focus on the interaction between the human characters. Between the group of thieves and the college students, there’s about half a body of talent between them all. I don’t know where these films find these people (well actually I do – their close friends and family) but sometimes it borders on embarrassing just watching people try to act out roles like tough thieves, college students, scientists, etc. I’m sure they’ve all got a huge buzz out of starring in a film like this but for the rest of us watching, its painful to watch and listen to.

When a shark film is so bad it makes Raging Sharks look like Jaws, you know you’ve reached rock bottom. To call Jurassic Shark a feeble effort would do that word a disservice. I honestly cannot believe that something as amateurish as this actually managed to get a DVD release. Even more unbelievable in the fact that chumps like me paid to see it.

• AKA:


• Director: Phillip J. Roth


• Writer: Brett Orr (screenplay), Phillip J. Roth (screenplay)


• Starring: Lorenzo Lamas, Simmone Mackinnon, Jeffrey Gorman, Bruce Gray


• Run Time: 93 mins

No Air. No Time. No Escape.

When a pack of sharks attack an undersea oil station in the Gulf of Mexico, a science team is sent to investigate what happened. However their sub is attacked by the sharks and the only three survivors are picked up by a top secret Navy research submarine. It is there where the team find out the horrible truths about the deadly sharks and realise they must find a way to stop them before they reach the Florida coastline.

The killer shark sub-genre is arguably one of my favourites of horror and that’s mainly down to one of the only worthwhile entries: the all-time classic, Jaws. Pretty much every film containing killer sharks since then has truly been awful (Jaws 2 was an underrated sequel and Deep Blue Sea was trashy fun). This is a genre with such garbage as the Shark Attack trilogy, Shark Zone, Megalodon, Red Water, Blue Demon, Shark in Venice, Shark Hunter and many number of cheap foreign knock-offs. Does Dark Waters fit right in at home with them? Ha, is the Earth round?

In order to make a decent shark flick, you need to have one thing: sharks. Dark Waters goes to great lengths to avoid any sort of shark action. These predators aren’t well fed in the slightest and, save for the odd death here and there, they’re not the main focus of the story. There are some early attacks within the first five minutes to make you think that you’re in for a treat but then the treats dry up once the film has you believing in it. The sharks end up being off screen so much that you’ll forget you’re even watching a film with them in. Of course they show up as a token gesture in the finale but that’s more likely to remind the viewer that they’re watching a film about killer sharks as opposed to any real need for the story to have them there.

What you have instead is your typical mad scientist film where the main characters get into plenty of discussions and arguments with the mad scientist creator, get locked up for their troubles so that they can’t interrupt his experiments and then finally the scientist realises what a mistake he’s made before it’s too late and all hell has broken loose. There are lots of Navy guys running around in the submarine shooting at each other. There is really hot chick (Simmone Mackinnon) that spends most of the film in a bikini, a low-cut tank top or a wet t-shirt but who can’t act for toffee. There are some more Navy guys who constantly scream out “Now” at the end of every sentence (example being “open the doors, now!” or “full speed ahead, now”). It’s all very annoying but when a script is about killer sharks and decides to ditch them into the background in favour of all of this rubbish, it’s a no brainer how it is going to end – badly. The ending itself features a shocking sequence of events in which a load of innocent people are killed as well as the evil scientists. They were only doing their jobs!

The sharks don’t look too bad in CGI form – at least they’re not stock footage sharks – but you just don’t get enough of them. The film also gives them silly noises as if they’re motor cars racing along at the bottom of the sea. The effects are much better than you’ll see in some of the other killer shark flicks but given what happens in the film and what the sharks are required to do, the budget doesn’t match the scope in any shape. Physics never come into the equation in this type of flick and the sharks are able to do stuff they have no business doing. But you get to see so little of them, I wouldn’t have been bothered if they started walking on land or firing laser beams from their frickin’ heads (ten points if you got that last reference).

Dark Waters takes Deep Blue Sea and runs it through a blender, ripping out anything interesting or dramatic it had and presenting the empty rest inside a DVD case. A definite no-no. The only thing the sharks need to be fed here is the script writer and the director.

• AKA:


• Director: Bob Misiorowski


• Writer: Scott Devine, William Hooke


• Starring: Casper Van Dien, Ernie Hudson, Jennifer McShane, Bentley Mitchum


• Run Time: 95 mins

There’s Blood In The Water

A marine biologist heads to an African fishing village which is suddenly having a large spate of shark attacks, one of which claimed the life of his good friend. But as he investigates further, he realises that there may be more than just a shark problem in the village.

Clearly going for the shock tactics of having a rather aggressive-looking shark on the poster, Shark Attack comes hot on the heels of disposable big budget shark-fest Deep Blue Sea, no doubt catching a ride in the wake of the ‘genetically engineered sharks go bad’ theme whilst the current was still strong. But don’t expect anything even a quarter as entertaining as Renny Harlin’s unfairly maligned shocker – these sharks here have little bite.

Shark Attack isn’t really a horror film. Yes, the elements of sharks attacking people can be considered part of the horror genre but there were killer sharks in Live and Let Die but no one considers that a horror flick. No, Shark Attack plays out like the low budget TV movie that it is – more content to play up the mystery-thriller aspects and throwing in some token attack scenes so that they could sell the story as something different. This is a dull human drama first and foremost. The genetic engineering storyline is wheeled out here as the sharks are having the size of their brain cells increased in size so that more vital proteins can be extracted (hmmm, where have I heard that before?). The side effect here is not that they get smarter but more aggressive, though I’m sure you wouldn’t be best pleased at having metal rods shoved into your head every other day.

At least the sharks look real. They should do I might add considering they’re nearly all made up of stock footage. Apart from a couple of quick shots where a rubber fin is used to home in on the actors in the water, the rest of the shark footage has been ‘borrowed’ from the Discovery Channel or one of those channels. Sharks vary in size between shots, depending on whatever footage they were using. Attack scenes consist of little more than shoddily-edited footage being spliced together with a bit of fake blood in the water. At no point do shark and human ever co-exist on the same shot. But there are so few of them throughout the film that these points become somewhat trivial. You might as well make the most of the brief attacks whilst you can – you know, small mercies and all of that – because there’s little else to get excited about.

Shark Attack at least tries to wheel out some ‘big guns’ to beef up its cast. Say what you like about his acting ability (and don’t worry, I will) but Casper Van Dien was reasonably hot property back in the late 90s thanks to Starship Troopers and tipped for big things. But his big things ended up being Python, Starship Troopers 3: Marauder and Dracula 3000. Van Dien at least manages to act in his native accent though the film curiously just refers to the country as ‘Africa’ all of the time. Please tell me that was a mistake and not showing the intelligence level of the writers here.

And when you say to someone “One of the Ghostbusters is in this” then no doubt they’d get their hopes up for a Bill Murray or Dan Aykroyd appearance, less so Harold Ramis but he’d still be the best thing in it. But unfortunately it’s the other Ghostbuster – the black guy who started tagging along in the final third of Ghostbusters – Ernie Hudson. He’s a decent actor as proven in his turns in the likes of The Crow and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle but his role as the token bad guy gets a bit embarrassing towards the end of the film as Hudson is forced to go into villain overdrive, explaining his schemes like some Bond villain and telling Van Dien that he is going to die.

Shark Attack is like watching an overlong version of Baywatch when the sharks popped up as the threat-of-the-week to The Hoff and Pamela Anderson. It’s got all of the production values of a TV show and is about as exciting as watching a sea snail. Somehow it spawned a couple of sequels (which got worse in quality but better in pure entertainment).

• AKA:


• Director: Matt Codd


• Writer: Phillip J. Roth (story), Sam Wells (screenplay)


• Starring: Antonio Sabato Jr., Christain Toulali, Grand L. Bush, Heather Marie Marsden


• Run Time: 94 mins

Danger in the deep

Years after his parents are killed by a supposedly-extinct prehistoric Megalodon shark, Dr Spencer has become obsessed with hunting it down and killing it. When an underwater research facility is destroyed, Spencer is assigned to the Argus, a huge submarine that he designed himself, in an attempt to find out what happened. Spencer suspects that his old nemesis, the Megalodon, is behind the destruction and is intent on using the Argus to extract his revenge.

Basically The Hunt for Red October but with a giant shark instead of a Russian submarine, Shark Hunter was one of a small wave of really low budget creature feature films which latched onto the Megalodon shark as some sort of cash cow. Released between 2001 and 2002, the other films include Shark Attack 3: Megalodon and Megalodon. As you can imagine judging by the titles (and the fact that I’m mentioning them all in the same breath), none of them are any good – so much so that it is hard to decide which is the first. Shark Hunter gives the other two a run for their money in this respect.

It cannot be said that Shark Hunter is boring as the shark gets highly agitated and causes a lot of problems, being on-screen far more than I’d have expected. There is plenty of submarine versus shark action but you’d have thought that no matter how big a shark can grow, it’s still flesh and blood so the submarine should have no problem blowing it up if it really wanted to with a couple of well-placed torpedoes. Watching the two do battle underwater is like watching Godzilla battle with his mechanical doppelganger. The special effects have at least given the artists some scope to dramatically increase the size of the shark and submarine respectively so these are no ordinary-sized objects. The shark has this smirk on its face all throughout the film – you’re just waiting for it to full open its mouth and start humming the Jaws theme. Anyone remember Finding Nemo with the “fish are friends, not food” sharks with the grins on their faces? This Megalodon looks like an elder relative, though at least the sharks in Finding Nemo were meant to look cartoony since it was a kid’s film after all. I’m not sure that blowing one up in size and slapping it in this flick was really going to cut the mustard with the more adult audience.

Not only does the shark look bad but Shark Hunter is one of the earlier examples of a straight-to-DVD film that I can remember which feature seemingly entire scenes constructed of CGI. Granted whilst the effects are not believable in the slightest (at no point will the film ever convince you that its supposed to be set underwater), the fact that they’re mostly computer-generated at least means the effects team get to play around with the size and scope and everything, hence the gigantism present in the shark and submarine. What little of the film has been shot on sound stages is sparsely decorated, adding to the illusion that someone just decked out their basement for a few weeks and allowed the crew to film there.

I also expect a certain degree of entertainment when sharks attack people and most of the films in this sub-Jaws genre manage to contain at least one average attack scene. This doesn’t happen here and the viewer is left feeling a little ripped off as a result. I didn’t even care about the people when they eventually got eaten because the characters are so bland. The gigantic size of the shark means it should be able to swallow its victims whole which does little to add to the dramatic tension whenever someone gets chomped – its all over in a heartbeat.

The whole story about the boy wanting revenge and building this sub sounds like a bad soap story. It had potential for a bit of drama but with Antonio Sabato Jr. in the lead role failing to emote on any level whatsoever, any sort of feeling we were supposed to harbour towards him and his quest of vengeance are non-existent. The script is really poor and when the best actor is Grand L. Bush, then you’re having problems. Bush popped up in small roles in loads of big action films in the 90s like Die Hard, Lethal Weapon and Licence to Kill and no doubt was remembering his glory days when he was wading through the trash and found the script to Shark Hunter.

The film’s only highlight is the less-than-happy ending which is a real breath of fresh air from the usual hero saves the day crap. But I was probably only happy about the ending because it meant that the film was over and I wouldn’t have to subject myself to this trash anymore.

Shark Hunter’s cover makes it look like this is a really cracking shark-on-the-loose film but it’s not. It’s clear that no one really have a toss whilst making the film so why should you bother watching?