Yeah, I know. Everybody does movie reviews and it's about as original as putting mushrooms on a pizza, but bear with me. I've got a shitload of really bad films on DVD and I literally paid a fortune for them (for reasons I don't want to elaborate right now), so I've got to do something with them. Reviews of bad movies are always nice to read, and I hope that mine prove to be more entertaining than the films themselves (which isn't hard to accomplish anyway). The little twist is that you will probably never get to see the films I am going to review here, because they don't get any sort of major distribution, i.e. you will never see them on TV or in the cinema, and if you ever find them in a "5 DVDs for 3,99" bin you'll put them back in because the titles and cover pictures already indicate everything this movie is going to be.
The movie I am going to review now goes by the name Shark, or Great White. Apparently, the film got two releases and was retitled at some point. Way to suck people into watching this twice, because even once is more than enough for a lifetime. Anyway, I am going to refer to it as Shark here.
I am not exaggarating when I say that this film is so traumatisingly bad that I still get nightmares from it, two and a half years after watching it. It's not bad in the Ed Wood "so bad it's funny" style, and it's not bad in the way Wanted was, because that was so bad it was just forgettable. A few months after watching that one, I had to read a review of it to remember that it was the film which actually featured a century-old loom that told names of assassination targets in binary.
No, Shark is something else, and not in a good way. You can probably already imagine the plot from the film's title. Yes, it is about a shark terrorising a small village and some disillusioned bloke tries to convince local authorities of the threat and eventually they team up and kill the beast. This film tries to add a special shock effect by having the shark swim up a river on the American east coast several miles and state that this is based on a true story that happened at some point in the 1910's. It did, but the plot of this film has about as much to do with the real events as Raiders of the Lost Ark has to do with the history of flight, as in, there are some old aeroplanes in that film.
So what is it that makes this film so exceptionally bad? Let's start with the shark itself and its attacks. For the most part of the film, the shark is portrayed by a rubber fin that is sometimes leaning to its side at a pretty big angle. It also varies in size. The attacks happen at any time of the day and at any place in the river, no matter how shallow it is. In fact, at one point, a bloke who is standing in the river fishing is attacked and eaten up by the shark, and at another point the shark attacks some guy who is trying to fix a watergate at night time. This does not sound as spectacular as it actually is, but you have to imagine the bloke is standing on a pedestal, with only his rubber boots a few inches in the water, and the shark attacks him.
The most memorable scene of the film has a group of people jetski in the midst of the river. One guy's jetski breaks and he attempts to get it going again while sitting on it, without even the tip of his shoe in the water. As menacing music is cued, a big rubber fin which is driven forward by a red motor approaches the jetski and then the bloke screams and falls into the water. The next picture shows a shark eating a fish (footage that is credited to some institute of marine biology or whatever).
The film's protagonist is a marine biologist who is the only one to recognise the wounds of the victims as those of a shark and not, as everybody else says, a cougar.
By the way, I've got to get this out now. A cougar? This film is supposed to take place at the American East Coast, and there are no cougars at the American East Coast! Apart from an isolated population in Florida, every bloody cougar in North America lives west of the Mississippi!
But it's not like this is the biggest geographic screwup in the film. Tell me, what American East Coast state has license plates that say "California" on them, and how many towns there have road signs pointing to Nevada? Seriously, I live in feckin' Germany and I can tell that something's not right there!
Anyway, back to our hero, the marine biologist, who seems to have gotten his office from the college's doorman. During the entire length of the film, he desperately tries to keep his teenage son from rafting on the river. He is so paranoid about it that it becomes obvious that he is not doing that only because of the shark. No, it is later revealed, and this is no joke, that our glorious marine biologist is... afraid of water.
After this H-Bomb of plotholes is dropped, the sad remains of the film are tidied up by two stock characters, the initially disbelieving but eventually supportive county sheriff (complete with stupid sunglasses and 'tache) and the drunkard who is ridiculed by everybody but becomes the hero of the day. At the end of the movie, he stands atop a bridge crossing the river, drops some obviously empty gas canisters on the shark (which is just about to attack the marine biologist's teenage son and his mates on their rafts) and fires at them from a clearly uncharged sniper rifle, and even I could see that although I literally couldn't tell a pump gun from a kalashnikov. The shark explodes in a pathetic attempt to imitate the end of Jaws, only that this is like somebody trying to copy the Mona Lisa, but instead of using paint he uses dog shit and instead of painting the Mona Lisa he draws a picture of the sewer I'm about to drop the DVD in.
I hate this movie. It's not funny, it's just bad. It's terrible. As I said, I am traumatised from this film, I have seen it two and a half years ago and I still remember every pathetic bit of it. Even the actors, as terrible as they are, do not deserve to be in such a movie. I hope they at least got some of the money I had to spend on this so they can buy themselves a gun and shoot their brains out because they can't possibly lead happy lives anymore after being in such a movie.
What a bloody waste.
The movie I am going to review now goes by the name Shark, or Great White. Apparently, the film got two releases and was retitled at some point. Way to suck people into watching this twice, because even once is more than enough for a lifetime. Anyway, I am going to refer to it as Shark here.
I am not exaggarating when I say that this film is so traumatisingly bad that I still get nightmares from it, two and a half years after watching it. It's not bad in the Ed Wood "so bad it's funny" style, and it's not bad in the way Wanted was, because that was so bad it was just forgettable. A few months after watching that one, I had to read a review of it to remember that it was the film which actually featured a century-old loom that told names of assassination targets in binary.
No, Shark is something else, and not in a good way. You can probably already imagine the plot from the film's title. Yes, it is about a shark terrorising a small village and some disillusioned bloke tries to convince local authorities of the threat and eventually they team up and kill the beast. This film tries to add a special shock effect by having the shark swim up a river on the American east coast several miles and state that this is based on a true story that happened at some point in the 1910's. It did, but the plot of this film has about as much to do with the real events as Raiders of the Lost Ark has to do with the history of flight, as in, there are some old aeroplanes in that film.
So what is it that makes this film so exceptionally bad? Let's start with the shark itself and its attacks. For the most part of the film, the shark is portrayed by a rubber fin that is sometimes leaning to its side at a pretty big angle. It also varies in size. The attacks happen at any time of the day and at any place in the river, no matter how shallow it is. In fact, at one point, a bloke who is standing in the river fishing is attacked and eaten up by the shark, and at another point the shark attacks some guy who is trying to fix a watergate at night time. This does not sound as spectacular as it actually is, but you have to imagine the bloke is standing on a pedestal, with only his rubber boots a few inches in the water, and the shark attacks him.
The most memorable scene of the film has a group of people jetski in the midst of the river. One guy's jetski breaks and he attempts to get it going again while sitting on it, without even the tip of his shoe in the water. As menacing music is cued, a big rubber fin which is driven forward by a red motor approaches the jetski and then the bloke screams and falls into the water. The next picture shows a shark eating a fish (footage that is credited to some institute of marine biology or whatever).
The film's protagonist is a marine biologist who is the only one to recognise the wounds of the victims as those of a shark and not, as everybody else says, a cougar.
By the way, I've got to get this out now. A cougar? This film is supposed to take place at the American East Coast, and there are no cougars at the American East Coast! Apart from an isolated population in Florida, every bloody cougar in North America lives west of the Mississippi!
But it's not like this is the biggest geographic screwup in the film. Tell me, what American East Coast state has license plates that say "California" on them, and how many towns there have road signs pointing to Nevada? Seriously, I live in feckin' Germany and I can tell that something's not right there!
Anyway, back to our hero, the marine biologist, who seems to have gotten his office from the college's doorman. During the entire length of the film, he desperately tries to keep his teenage son from rafting on the river. He is so paranoid about it that it becomes obvious that he is not doing that only because of the shark. No, it is later revealed, and this is no joke, that our glorious marine biologist is... afraid of water.
After this H-Bomb of plotholes is dropped, the sad remains of the film are tidied up by two stock characters, the initially disbelieving but eventually supportive county sheriff (complete with stupid sunglasses and 'tache) and the drunkard who is ridiculed by everybody but becomes the hero of the day. At the end of the movie, he stands atop a bridge crossing the river, drops some obviously empty gas canisters on the shark (which is just about to attack the marine biologist's teenage son and his mates on their rafts) and fires at them from a clearly uncharged sniper rifle, and even I could see that although I literally couldn't tell a pump gun from a kalashnikov. The shark explodes in a pathetic attempt to imitate the end of Jaws, only that this is like somebody trying to copy the Mona Lisa, but instead of using paint he uses dog shit and instead of painting the Mona Lisa he draws a picture of the sewer I'm about to drop the DVD in.
I hate this movie. It's not funny, it's just bad. It's terrible. As I said, I am traumatised from this film, I have seen it two and a half years ago and I still remember every pathetic bit of it. Even the actors, as terrible as they are, do not deserve to be in such a movie. I hope they at least got some of the money I had to spend on this so they can buy themselves a gun and shoot their brains out because they can't possibly lead happy lives anymore after being in such a movie.
What a bloody waste.
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