Friday, June 22, 2012

Shark Movies



Climactic scene from JAWS!

I like shark movies. Just do. 
Sadly, there have been only two* really good shark movies. JAWS and Deep Blue Sea. 

By the way, the Louisiana license plates in Deep Blue Sea and Shark Tale are homages to the one in JAWS.


JAWS 2 was okay. The higher the number, the worse the movie. As far as the JAWS series goes anyway. 
 
  
The silliest of all shark movies has to be Raging Sharks. The opening scene looks like something out of a Star Wars movie. As I remember it, a UFO drops something into the ocean that makes the shark "rage" five years later. [I was wrong! This one isn't the worst after all. See the June 12, 2009 update below.] 

Of course, there have been others that were worse because of lousy CGI, cheesy dialogue, and bad acting, but as far as plot goes, sharks enraged by space aliens tops the list of silly ideas.
Spring Break Shark Attack was so bad I don't even remember much of it. I think the fins looked like cardboard. The fake shark fin in JAWS, used by the two boys pulling a prank, actually looked more realistic than what they used. 

Open Water bored me. I only thought it to be a much better movie after I had already seen it and found out that they used real sharks. I wondered how they got such realistic CGI effects. 


 I saw a DVD for Shark Swarm at Best Buy. It was only $10. I decided not to get it though, because I've already bought quite a few shark movies that I'll never watch again. I plan to watch it if and when I reactivate my Blockbuster Total Access Movie Pass. And just because it's there, I may have to watch Open Water 2. [Strangely, Open Water 2 didn't have any sharks!]


 One of the saddest days of my life was when I watched JAWS for maybe the sixth or seventh time; and suddenly, the shark looked fake.



April 17, 2009:

I have a new one to add to the list! Sharks in Venice. An unintentionally funny film. Only one guy's left in the water. The shark attacks him. You see his severed leg floating to the bottom. And then, in the next scene, he still has both of his legs! Apparently, he's Chameleon Man; and his legs grow back. (Like a chameleon's tail would; not a chameleon's legs. Or would a chameleon's legs grow back too?) The "vicious" attacks on gondolas garnered a few laughs. Lots of silly stuff. Gotta love the behind-the-dorsal-fin cam!

June 12, 2009:
The worst shark movie of all time! Marina Monster. (Apparently the sequel to her 2006 Sharp Teeth, which wasn't about sharks, but mutated carp. Ill-tempered, mutated carp.) This movie's about a male bull shark. Why? Male bull sharks reach maturity around 6.3 feet. This one, which was an obvious toy or other such facsimile, barely looked 6 feet long. And yet, it devoured 2, 3, even 4 people at a time! Even the 25-foot Great White Shark from JAWS never ate four people at a time. This breaks William C. Martell's advice, which Deep Blue Sea did at the beginning too, but every time people stood on a dock about 2-3 feet above the water, if one person fell in, they all fell in! Every time! And then, in a matter of seconds, the shark (or its fin) would appear; and eat everyone who fell in. (Martell's advice is to leave someone on the dock, ship, or shore, like in JAWS, so not everyone's in the water, to provide a variety of emotions.) Also, every time Earl Molar saw his dad, he'd say, "Father. I mean Admiral Molar." Every time! Yes, his dad told him not to call him father or dad, but they had the same exchange every time. A running gag gets repeated about three times. This must have been said 20 times. Does that make it a marathon gag? But the weirdest thing of all is whenever the shark attacked, the film cut to a character who never interacted with anyone else in the story, a professor who came across as a defrocked rabbi, and would say something inane like "He sure can eat a lot." I could be wrong. Perhaps the weirdest part was the shark talking near the end. Lastly, the shark gets destroyed an hour into the movie. Since this is only a 72 minute movie; that means the monster got killed 5/6 of the way into the story. I didn't think anything could be worse than a shark movie with space aliens, but I think this one wins the booby prize. I can handle low-budgetness and a lack of special effects, but I can't abide a lack of a story! Fortunately, I watched it for free, so it didn't cost me anything except time and sanity.



June 28, 2009:
Last night, I finally got to see Shark Swarm. While not in the same class at JAWS or Deep Blue Sea, this "mini-series" was pretty good. Of course, after seeing Marina Monster, anything would seem pretty good. I did save $10 though, 'cause I don't think I'd ever watch it again. It's 2 hours and 40 minutes long! It had the evil developer who's destroying the fish to force the locals will sell their property to him, so he can make oceanview condos. Of course, our hero won't sell. And wouldn't you know it? His property's smack dab in the middle of where the condos go! Can you sense the imminent danger? Well, not too imminent since this thing goes on for 2 hours and 40 minutes. And wouldn't you know it? The gunk that kills the fish happens to make sharks more aggressive and travel in schools, which they call swarms. Even loners like Great Whites form swarms. Whenever someone would venture into the water alone, I'd say to Amy, "Look who's next on the menu." And having watched so many movies and such, after a scene where you "bond" with one of the characters, I told her he was going to die. They always get you to like someone before they kill him off. It wasn't the next scene like I thought, but that's because they broke the rule where you don't show explosives, if nothing's going to explode. Alfred Hitchcock said something to the effect that if you show a gun in Act One, it had better go off by Act Three. But it was still fun. We were amused how everyone related to the hero ended up as a couple. Even Granny hooked up with the pastor. It was fun, not like the greats, but they didn't have their big budget either. The pulse guns looked like toys. I didn't like the baptismal gathering at the beach being attacked by sharks. And I don't understand, if the gunk kills fish, why didn't it kill the sharks. Last time I checked, sharks were fish. Did I mention that this was 2 hours and 40 minutes?






And the day before that, I watched Shark Attack in the Mediterranean. This one wasn’t too bad either. But again, after watching Marina Monster, anything else seems like the Shakespeare of shark movies. A German film with the English dubbed in. Interesting conflict with the hero’s best friend. He wants the monster shark to live, because the local lab thinks they can find the cure to cancer from sharks (apparently the only animal not contract cancer); and his wife’s dying of cancer. Meanwhile, our hero wants to kill the shark, because this is the same shark that killed his own wife two years prior. So in a way, the hero’s rather selfish wanting revenge instead of helping find a cure to cancer. The lying scientist summed up this movie best when she said, “That’s impossible. A shark like that (a 100-foot Megalodon) couldn’t exist, because someone would have seen it.” Duh! (But like I said, she lied, because she knew about the shark all along.) 


July 2, 2009:
To save you the trouble, Open Water 2: Adrift is NOT a shark movie. Wouldn't you think the sequel to a shark movie would be a shark movie? The gist is that 6 people jump off a yacht to swim in the ocean and then realize that no one let down the ladder. And there's a baby left onboard by herself. A couple of people bled here and there, but still, no sharks! Argh! I might have enjoyed the movie more had I know it wasn't a shark movie. I kept wondering what was taking them so long to have the sharks appear. Also, these people were in swimsuits, more or less, so I wondered how'd they be able to use real sharks again since no one wore the protective armor underneath their wetsuits like last time.

November 22, 2009:
Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus was sort of silly, as you can imagine by the title. But not silly enough. If you’re going to be hokey, be hokey. Make it fun. This film had some hokeyness, but not enough to be entertaining. Only enough to ruin the integrity of the movie’s “reality”. In the opening scene, a pod of large whales swim past a submarine. The woman in the sub wonders why so many whales are together. A helicopter drops a device into the water which transmits low frequency waves which cause the whales to swim into the ice wall. The woman in the sub detects the transmitter and says that’s why the whales grouped together. But the whales were already grouped together before the transmitter was dropped. Either poor editing, poor scriptwriting, or poor continuity. But that’s not the worst of it. Shortly thereafter, after the Mega Shark has revived -- The whales smashing into the ice wall caused a long ago (80 million years!) frozen Mega Shark and a Giant Octopus to be freed from their icy prison. Once, the ice around them smashed apart, they sprung back to life. Makes no sense. A volcanic eruption would have provided a sudden amount of heat which might have made more “sense” than simply having the ice break. -- The Mega Shark jumps out of the water and attacks a 747! The altitude and speed of a 747 would make that impossible, regardless of the Mega Shark’s mega size. But after such a hokey beginning, the rest of the movie seems a bit blah. So I can’t even recommend this one for its hokey-ness factor. On the plus side, I watched it for “free” on NetFlix.



June 21, 2012:
2-Headed Shark Attack. Silly, but not in a good way. Not in the way that I had hoped. I really looked forward to watching this, thinking this would be a lot of fun. I even bought a bunch of candy. And all I can say is: I enjoyed the candy. Fortunately, I watched this for free by using a Promo Code at Redbox. The only funny part was this startling revelation by one of the characters about the shark which had two heads: "It has twice the teeth." On the other hand, that's great screenwriting advice, when you have a danger, you double it! 
I've seen several others not mentioned here. I felt disappointed by both Swamp Shark and Shark Night. They were both silly, but again, not in a good way. But they could have been great, because the premise of sharks going into the swamp was so timely when they came out, due to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico sent some man-eating bull sharks up the Mississippi River. So they could've created realistic plots. 
At least Shark Night had Katharine McPhee. Which is always a plus. Except she got eaten. (Beauty is not meant to be eaten. Unless it’s beautiful chunks of chocolate.) I could watch a film where Katharine McPhee just smiles at the camera for two hours; and I’d give that movie two thumbs up. Better yet would be a flick where she wears glasses until she sees the Bat Signal; and then she puts on a pink Supergirl outfit to fight crime and/or sharks, by climbing walls, shooting webs, and deflecting bullets and/or shark's teeth with her golden bracelets. That would be cool. And I know that sounds convoluted and/or contradictory. But hey, the heart wants what the heart wants. 


Until next time, please heed this friendly advice that I impart: 
Never French kiss a shark! 
All The Best,
For Another Shark Movie Review, Click Below: 
* Three if you count "Soul Surfer" as a shark movie. I don't, because that movie was more about the victim than the shark. You hardly saw the shark. Besides, shark movies are fantasy and only fun when the victims are evil. But "Soul Surfer" was based on a true story; and that darling girl didn't deserve to be attacked. 

* Now four, when you include Sharknado!
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