Shark Season (2020)

"3 miles off-shore... and a great white in-between!"

Plot

Kayaking offshore to a secret rock formation for a photoshoot, Sarah and her Meghan become the target of an aggressive great white shark. With the tide coming in and realising their island will soon be underwater, the women must fend off the deadly predator as they attempt to reach another nearby island.

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I thought I knew what was I getting in for here with The Asylum logo in the credits but damn, even they have set a new low bar and I honestly think I can't do it anymore. Ever since The Shallows featured Blake Lively being stuck on a rocky outcrop and then a buoy out in the middle of a bay with a shark preventing her from escaping, other filmmakers have tried their best to repeat the same story and expect the same results with lesser budgets, be those characters being stuck on a life raft (Great White), a jet ski (Shark Bait) or just a broken boat (Shark Frenzy, Blind Waters). Forgetting the absolute insanity of kayaking out into open sea for three hours to find the uncharted rock formation in order for our plot to kick off, Shark Season easily is the worst of the bunch.

One trope that I really hope The Asylum quickly get out of is using the "father saves his daughter" trope that both this and the later Shark Frenzy follow. This is where a teenage daughter is stuck out at sea somewhere after being attacked by a shark and the only person they are able to contact is their father who then spends half of the film trying to save them.. via the phone. It sucks any sort of tension out of the film knowing that, albeit briefly, the girls out at sea can communicate back to dry land. I mean, I guess its kind of realistic in not having much of a signal out in the middle of nowhere but still, for the film to deliver some drama, you need to find a way to keep your characters completely isolated and resigned to the hopelessness of their situation.

In Shark Season, you never truly get the feeling that the girls are stuck, hell you rarely get the feeling that they're out at sea full stop. Close-ups of the cast rarely show them actually in a kayak, let alone out at sea or any body of water. They're generally filmed with the camera looking up at them from the waist so its not rocket science to work out they might just be sat on the beach pretending to paddle (and no water splashes up as they row). There are a few shots of them in a kayak on the water somewhere but no grand sweeping vistas of characters out in the deep blue sea as you had in Shark Bait or The Reef: Stalked. Just when you think the characters are on their own, along comes a random jet skier (bear in mind they're supposed to be out in the uncharted open sea with no land nearby) to say hi and add another body to the count It's impossible to build tension when things as stupid as this happen.

Michael Madsen 'stars' and damn, I feel sorry for him slumming so badly in his later years. He looks and sounds atrocious. Madsen stares, and I mean stares, all wide-eyed at something off-camera for most of his lines, obviously reading a cue card since the dialogue is utterly absurd. Blink if you're in trouble, Michael. Madsen literally phones it in too - his character spends the bulk of the film talking on the phone either to his daughter or the coast guard. Given how terrible he looks (Is he in his dressing gown? How about combing your hair before going on camera?), I wouldn't be surprised to find out he just filmed in his front room for an hour because he doesn't appear on camera with anyone else in the cast.

Between him and the monotone coast guard, they have numerous conversations over the phone which are just pure exposition. They talk about triangulating the phone signals and changing search grids to begin with and then the coast guard spends about ten minutes prattling around about whale carcasses and the hunting habits of sharks in a later sermon. It's ridiculously monotonous and unnecessary and what's worse is that the bulk of the shots of the coast guard are from behind - so we spend ages seeing the back of his head as he pretends to pilot a boat which clearly doesn't look like it's moving at all. This whole sub-plot is surreal and the script spends so much time explaining such simple things that actually didn't need explaining in the first place. Considering how many times he speaks to his daughter over the phone during her plight, you never get the feeling that she's more than a few minutes from being rescued. I do have to point out that both Paige McGarvin and Juliana Destefano are fine as far as their performance goes, but no one can battle against a script this lousy.

I haven't even talked about the shark either but the effects are atrocious, the same real shark footage is recycled numerous times and the way in which its defeated sets a new low benchmark for this type of genre film. It shouldn't be that easy. However, the effects are the least of Shark Season's problems.

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Final Verdict

Shark Season is the nadir of the killer shark movie of the last few years. It's utterly terrible filmmaking on almost every level. You just can't do this type of film on the cheap and expect to do anything with it. No scares. No excitement. No clue. If this is Shark Season, then roll on the autumn.

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Shark Season Also Known As: Shark Attack Director(s): Jared Cohn Writer(s): Mark Atkins (screenplay), Andrea Ruth (story) Actor(s): Michael Madsen, Paige McGarvin, Juliana Destefano, Jack Pearson, Lauren E. Hubbard, Nicholas Ryan, Christian Frazier, Josh Lovejoy Duration: 87 mins