TITLE & REVIEW
A ship full of college students gets into trouble.
Unfortunately there is a two-headed man-eating shark in the water.
Professor Charlie O'Connell (
Sliders
) takes the co-eds to a nearby desert island.
Carmen Electra
works on her suntan.
This starts with a bad homage to
Jaws (1975)
. A beach bum swims out to the bollard,
in the hope of getting a hot girl to go skinny-dipping.
Unfortunately, there is a white shark in the area.
Not a great shark, because it is dodgy CGI
and what made Jaws great is that the director realised less is more.
Instead of over-exposing his special effects,
which he realised were of limited realism,
Steven Spielberg
created suspense by keeping the shark's on-screen time to a minimum.
However, The Asylum knew that their shark's three heads were its unique selling point
and so the shark is in as many shots as possible.
Worse, everything is filmed in medium shot
so there are no establishing shots or intense close-ups.
A group of civilian environmental activists are given a tour of the US Government's scientific research station in the middle of the Pacific Ocean's garbage area. The pollution is so bad that twenty percent of the local aquatic life is mutated. This explains the shark's three heads, as well as its abnormal feeding activity. Well, this is not a documentary so do not expect factual accuracy about sharks.
As in Deep Blue Sea the remote underwater research station fails and the shark starts to eat everyone.
The survivors make their getaway on a speedboat. The shark goes after a nearby booze cruise. Someone has got a flat-bottom paddle-steamer in the middle of the Pacific.
The characters include Karrueche Tran , best known as a model. She only gets a couple of bikini scenes, so this is a wasted opportunity.
Luckily, help is at hand in the shape of fisherman Danny Trejo armed with his trademark Machete . Danny has his trademark machete, while his two crewmen have assault rifles. Seriously.
The shark has a superpower. Every time one head gets chopped off, two grow back. This implies this is the shark from the original movie, and that the monsters in the subsequent movies may be the same creature too.
This is The Asylum's third movie in the series.
They seem to have skipped four-headed shark attack,
because the shark grows its fifth head in the course of the movie.
Some bikini models do a photo-shoot on a boat off the coast of Puerto Rico. They see a big dorsal fin in the water, and all rush to the side of the boat to take a look. Unfortunately the shark can jump out of the water, and with four mouths it can eat four victims simultaneously. The fifth head grows out of its tail. Physically impossible, you cry, but no more so than anything else about it.
The police go to the local college, and ask the resident marine biologist for help. She says she cannot help them, but immediately she gets the chance she goes hunting for the creature. After all, it breaks all the laws of nature so she can hardly call herself a scientist if she does not investigate.
The biologist, Dr Angie Yost ( Nikki Howard ), seems to be about the same age as her students but looks even better than them in a string bikini. She calls out her boss, the college administrator, for being the stereotypical greedy bastard from this kind of movie. However, she goes along with his plans every single time.
The biologist's boyfriend, Red (Chris Bruno - Dead Zone ), is basically Quint from Jaws (1975) packaged as a male model. He takes the survivors out to catch or kill the shark.
This starts in 1984 with a group of college students
partying with some daytime drinking to celebrate graduation.
They are at a maritime research station near Isla Corazon.
Unfortunately the six-headed shark gate-crashes the party.
Presumably there are no survivors.
In the modern day, the island plays host to a boot camp for couples with marital disputes. Ironically the married couple supposed to be running it have split up, with the female psychiatrist heading off in her speedboat. The staff are still around, on the yacht - the only way on or off the island. If anything were to happen to them or the boat, everyone would be trapped on the island ...
The married couples are CIS-het pairs. The males are beardy and paranoid, for comic relief, while the females all look spectacular in their bikinis. Predictably, they still get bumped off one at a time.
It turns out that the shark was genetically engineered, presumably by the college team in the early 1980s. Its natural regenerative ability has been boosted so that it does not just heal, it grows. Worse, it can now actually walk on land by using its flanking heads as legs. No explanation is given as to how it can breathe in air.
A couple of twenty-something American girls (
Mandy Moore, Claire Holt
) are on holiday in Mexico.
They get talked into taking a cruise on a rickety old boat owned by Captain Matthew Modine (
Jack And The Beanstalk
). The highlight of the tour is a cage-diving trip in shark-infested waters.
Naturally, something goes badly wrong. The girls end up trapped at the bottom of the ocean, about a hundred and fifty feet under the surface. They have a limited air supply, and there are a couple of massive sharks circling the area.
The resulting film is atmospheric and suspenseful, which it achieves on a limited budget. This was originally intended as a cheap straight-to-video effort. However, presumably due to the success of similar film The Shallows it was given a catchier title and a cinematic release.
This story is about a pair of sisters,
but that that is one of very few things it has in common with the original film.
These sisters are at High School together in Mexico,
where one is a popular kid and the other is an outcast.
Their father (John Corbett -
The Visitor
) is an archaeologist who is busy exploring an underground Mayan city.
Due to the rising shoreline it is now flooded and underwater,
accessible only to SCUBA divers.
The girls meet up with a couple of friends, decide to quit the tourist tour their father booked them on, and instead sneak into the cave system where the city is. Naturally there is a cave-in, and an encounter with a hostile creature that is blind due to living its entire life underground. Yes, this owes a lot to The Descent ...
The subplot about the two sisters is put aside almost immediately, as the girls all get along like the best of friends. The setting of an underwater Mayan city is certainly original. That said, the enormous CGI shark is just less than convincing on every level. It is just too big to live in such a limited cave system, instead of the open ocean, and is really just good for jump-scares.
This is a
Jaws (1975)
rip-off, best described as
Deep Blue Sea
in a shopping mall.
It was produced by
Russell Mulcahy
, who had a promising future in the 1980s
but has spent a long time working on US TV shows instead.
However, it is probably his involvement that has gotten some more talent involved in the project as well.
Despite being a low-key, straight-to-video looking made-in-Australia cheapie, there are a couple of cast members who may be familiar to International audiences from their appearances on US TV shows. Phoebe Tonkin is a shoplifter, while Julian McMahon ( Charmed ) is there too, forced by a thug into robbing the store manager’s safe. Unfortunately, a tidal wave floods the shopping complex - and a handful of man-eating sharks are also swept in.
A group of American scientists are diving in Loch Ness, Scotland.
When a mysterious earthquake opens an underwater cavern,
the leader of the expedition is killed.
Elizabeth (
Lysette Anthony
), a television executive with bleached blonde hair trimmed short,
has financed the expedition in exchange for exclusive rights to the footage.
She is desperate to make her documentary a success,
so she sends her ex-lover to take over.
The monster is rarely scene, and even then it is fast-moving and concealed in glood. This is a saving grace, because dodgy CGI can be more disappointing than Spielberg's rubber shark. However, the SPFX is the least of this film's problems. With the exception of some stock helicopter footage and second unit shots of a Scottish road, this looks like it was shot in south California. The supporting cast do not even bother to attempt Scottish accents, and instead opt for terrible attempts at Irish accents. And since when have Scotsmen used dynamite to catch fish? The story may be about the Loch Ness monster, but if the film-makers do not bother to make an effort with the little things then suspension of disbelief is entirely out the window.
The storyline is like a dumbed-down version of Jaws (1975) . The Police Constable (Vernon Wells - Mad Max 2: Road Warrior ) does not want to prevent tourists from accessing the lake, so the scientists have to investigate without official help. In the third act a fisherman named Blay (Patrick Bergin - Robin Hood (1992) ), a Quint type, pops up to help. Not exactly original.
This starts with Murphy (Paul McGillion -
Stargate: Atlantis
) and a team of Canadian extras attempting Scottish accents.
They try to find the Loch Ness Monster's eggs,
but get eaten by an enormous hungry plesiosaur.
The only survivor is Murphy's young son.
Decades later, Murphy Junior (Brian Krause - Charmed ) has become a cryptozoologist, obsessed with hunting and the Loch Ness Monster. He comes to a small town in Canada, and hires local boatman Niall Matter ( Primeval: New World ) to take him out on the lake.
There are also some tweenagers as monster fodder. A European girl ( Serinda Swan ) and her friends go boating on a lake. This is in the Canadian wilderness, so there is not much excuse to wear a bikini, but it is that kind of setup.
The tweenagers go exploring, and run into the CGI beasties. Luckily Murphy has enough weapons to take Nessie down. The Deputy (Don Davis - Stargate: SG-1 ) tags along.
Lady scientist
Deedee Pfeiffer
and her ex-husband-to-be work for
Military-Industrial Complex bureaucrat Danny Woodburn (
SU2
). They are breeding a new, genetically engineered version of the Great White Shark.
The new ones can live in either salt or fresh water, like a River Shark.
And they have the speed of a Mako Shark, like in
Deep Blue Sea
.
Admiral Remora (Jeff Fahy - Lost ), a tongue-in-cheek character, is in command of the mission to control the shark.
This was directed by
Sean S Cunningham
, a veteran horror-movie creator.
It was released around the same time as James Cameron's
The Abyss
, and appears to be a cheaper version
trying to cash in on the big studio movie's success.
At least it has an original title - if it were released today
it would be called something like The Crevasse.
The cast are a likeable bunch of TV veterans, peppered with a few who had supporting roles in movies. Scarpelli ( Nia Peeples ) is hooking up with Richardson (Matt McCoy - Police Academy 5 ), while Norris ( Cindy Pickett ) is with McBride (Greg Evigan - Tek Wars ). Tech support is provided by Snyder (Miguel Ferrer - Robocop ).
The mission is a Cold War one, which seems dated now but was dated even then. After all, this movie was released a few months before the Berlin wall fell. The team are building underwater emplacements for the US Navy's nuclear missiles. They discover a subterranean cavern, and unwittingly unleash a life-form trapped inside. It is big and fast, and these days the film-makers would make it a Megalodon. Thankfully the film-makers knew what they were doing in the 1980s, so the monster is kept off-screen until it can be used for maximum effect rather than letting the audience get over-exposed to dodgy special effects.
Despite the presence of an enormous sea monster, most of the team's problems seemn to be caused by human error. Things get worse for the cast of The Abyss because one of the characters gets pressure-induced psychosis. In this movie, however, the equivalent character is just incompetent and does not forsee the consequences of his actions. This is very disappointing, because it completely stretches suspension of disbelief. It would make far more sense if that character were deliberately trying to kill everyone.
In the Third Act the monster gets into the main base, which is partially flooded and will explode in four hours time. All pretty generic stuff.
Eric Balfour (
TCM Remake
) has a boat in a tourist spot in Mexico.
Unfortunately, a prehistoric shark comes along and starts to eat everyone.
A bunch of babes are due to play a water-polo match. Will the shark arrive in time to disrupt the event and eat everyone?
Watch out for the creepy old man - it is a cameo by Producer Roger Corman .
Jaelyn (
Alicia Silverstone
) and Kyle (James Tupper -
Totem
) go for a romantic vacation at a remote seaside villa in Vietnam.
A tweenage couple anchor their yacht off a sandy atoll in the Pacific Ocean,
and go for a romantic swim together.
Unfortunately the local wildlife has other ideas.
Later, a seaplane pilot and his crew fly in with a couple of Japanese tourists as passengers. They discover remains of one of the victims, then hang around long enough to do the US Coastguard's job for them and search for the other victim. Of course, they totally ignore the danger that the killer shark might still be in the area.
The drama is character-based, but the characters are not entirely fleshed-out or likeable. The Japanese man's defining characteristic is racism against the Polynesian man, whose main characteristic is his blind devotion to the Caucasian pilot. The white man is supposedly an expert in sharks, since he has on-screen flashbacks to being attacked by one, but all he really does is lampshade the shark's unusual feeding behaviour.
The film tries to do what Jaws does so well, relying on suspense and only showing the monster sparingly. However, the Third Act descends to the level of The Shallows with its insane on-screen heroics.
This is set in a remote scientific outpost in the arctic circle.
The scientists are a group of young pretty people,
unlike the more realistic group of middle-aged men in
The Thing
.
The locals report that some hunters have not returned home. The scientists send people out to look. They suspect that polar bears might be responsible for the disappearances. What they discover is far worse. The local sharks have adopted atypical feeding patterns. They have developed the ability to launch themselves out of the water and land on the ice floes, where they can attack humans. This is actually more typical of killer whales. Yes, it turns out that the much-derided 1970s film Orca: The Killer Whale , basically a cheap and out-dated Jaws (1975) rip-off, is actually more scientifically accurate and a better-told story than its equivalent these days.
Not only has global warming altered the sharks' behaviour, it also causes the the icecap to melt at an accellerated rate. For some reason, the outpost was not designed to be submerged even though it was placed on the icecap and not on solid land. When the ice breaks, the outpost sinks. And since there are man-eating sharks in the water, evacuation is not going to be easy. Deep Blue Sea , anyone?
Luckily there is a search-and-rescue icebreaker ship in the area. It looks like a French Mistral-class vessel, one of the troop-carriers ordered by Russia before the invasion of the Ukraine and eventually sold to the Turkish Empire. A pity that they were not sold to the ANZAC navies instead, where they could have done search-and-rescue work in the antarctic ocean as well as enforcing International law across the Third World.
This is the archetypal modern-day monster movie,
and has been such since it came out in the 1970s.
Even the more recent films like
Jurassic Park
, which replaced animatronics with CGI,
owe a massive debt to this movie - if only because this is what director
Stephen Spielberg
cut his teeth on.
In fact, we could probably trace the modern genre back to his earlier film Duel,
and then to his influences in the B-Movies of the 1950s.
This is set in a small town on Amity Island, New York State. A tweenage girl goes missing while skinny-dipping. The next morning what's left of her is washed up on the sea shore. The town's Police Chief, Brody (Roy Scheider - ), wants to play it safe and shut the town's beaches until he knows what happened. The Mayor will not jeopardise the town's tourist trade. Not until the next victim, anyway, when it becomes painfully apparent that there is a man-eating shark in the area.
A victim's family puts a bounty on the shark's head. Naturally, lots of amateurs go after it, with unfortunate results. Chief Brody prefers to stick around with the scientist, Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss - ), who understand's the shark's behaviour better than the local fishermen.
Finally, in the third act, Brody and Hooper set sail with expert shark-hunter Quint (Robert Shaw - From Russia With Love ). They may be Three Men In A Boat, but the best literary comparison would be Moby Dick . Brody is afraid of the water, and Hooper has a childhood fascination with sharks, but Quint is a survivor of the USS Indianapolis and he is obsessed with taking down the shark.
In the process of adapting this from the novel, many things were changed. The Mayor's backstory, as a debtor to loan sharks, was omitted which leaves his actions poorly explained. Hooper's fate was changed, as was that of the shark itself. However, Spielberg delivers an amazing film that is now regarded as the first summer blockbuster from Hollywood.
The first movie was based on a novel by
Peter Benchley
, who was inspired by the true story of the Long Island shark attacks of 1916.
However, those attacks represent atypical behaviour of a shark.
As this series wore on, the behaviour the sharks exhibit becomes more and more bizarre.
For example, one man-eating shark is a rarity
and two different sharks targeting the same island is unlikely.
Worse, these are tropical sharks in temperate waters.
The new shark is drawn to the vibrations of engines,
and deliberately targets machines and boats.
People start to disappear in the water around Amity Island. A dead Killer Whale is discovered, and Brody suspects it lost a fight with a great white shark. Normally it is the whales who feed on the sharks, not the other way around,
Just like in the first film, nobody takes Brody seriously. Well, there is an element of genre blindness at work. Also, sequels need to undo any character development in the previous film so the character can experience the same journey they did first time round. The one positive thing that this film contributes is the failed rescue, a moment that entered the slasher genre in The Shining but is shown here a couple of years earlier.
A bunch of teenagers, always the typical monster-fodder for this kind of film, set out on their sail-boats. The shark trails them, and tries to pick them off one at a time. Can ex-Chief Brody save them in time? After all, like all good movie cops he has been taken off the case.
Spielberg did not return to make this follow-up to his classic original, and it certainly shows. What could have been a great film is merely okay. The greatest flaw is the over-use of the shark itself. In the original film, Spielberg used it sparingly because the animatronic technology had not been perfected yet. As a result, he achieved high levels of suspense whereas this effort loses suspension of disbelief every time the audience sees the fake-looking rubber shark.
The title sequence let us know exactly what we are in for.
Like the first movie, we see the ocean floor from the shark's perspective ...
but this time a fish is eaten, and its head floats in 3-D towards the camera.
Then the opening credits roll, again in gaudy 1980s 3-D.
Although Richard Matheson (
Moby Dick (1950)
) and Carl Gottleib (
Jaws (1975)
are the listed screenwriters, the director is not quite so famous.
This movie is set in a Florida water-park named Sea World, which allows the scope to be even bigger than the previous movies. In the second movie, the signature death scene is a waterskier. This time there is an entire human pyramid of water skiers. The good news is that one of them is Cally ( Lea Thompson ), who is an important co-star.
The park's owner, Calvin Bouchard (Louis Gossett Jnr - The Punisher (1990) ), hosts the arrival of special guest Philip Fitz Royce (Simon MacCorkindale - Relic Hunter ) - the underwater equivalent of a Great White Hunter. He once rammed a Japanese whaling ship because it was blocking his shot. Either he is a daredevil photographer, or a bloodthirsty sportsman and hunter of endangered species. This film has trouble working out which one.
The water park's fix-it man is Mike Brody (Dennis Quaid - Inner Space ). Yes, he is the tie-in with the original movies. His love interest is the park's marine biologist ( Bess Armstrong ). When they realise that the missing persons cases involve a shark, they set out to trap it - in a scene reminiscent of Quint and Hooper's plans. What could possibly go wrong?
This all leads up to a series of climactic underwater scenes. The filmmakers seem to have forgotten that what made the original film so successful was not the dodgy rubber shark, but the suspense created by its absence from the screen. In the third film the dodgy special effects are given centre stage, due to the focus on 3-D technology as its selling point. This has not aged well, and looks pretty terrible on a modern 2-D television set.
Ellen Brody (
Lorraine Gary
) should be happy as the queen bee of Amity Island.
Her husband has passed away off-screen,
but her younger son Sean has inherited the Sheriff's job.
He must have split up with Cally,
and this story does him no favours after the previous film.
Anyway, his job entails getting too close to the water.
Michael Brody (Lance Guest - ) has ditched his love interest from the previous movie and is now happily married to Carla ( Karen Young ). He is working on his PhD, alongside Jake (Mario Van Peebles - ). The good news is that they are in the Bahamas, three thousand miles away from danger. The bad news is that they are marine biologists ...
Ellen flies south to join Michael and his family. Unfortunately, she is obsessed with the idea that a great white shark is stalking her family. Even a holiday romance with Hoagie (Michael Caine - ), the local pilot and gambling addict, does not distract her from her paranoia.
This is set in a parallel universe where great white sharks love cold water and hate warm water. Therefore, when a great white appears in Michael's research area it is deemed a very unusual occurrance. Worse, when the shark ignores the Black men and goes after the Brody family, it seems like Ellen's paranoid fears are actually true. Perhaps the writers confused the shark with Orca: The Killer Whale - a creature that thrives in the polar oceans, and is theoretically capable of holding a grudge.
Ellen decides to track down the shark and face it in single combat. She is nothing if not confident - after all, her husband needed Quint and Hooper in the first film. At least this means she is not a damsel in distress, and does not need the male characters to save her. The movie also passes the Bechdel test, since she talks with her daughter-in-law and grand-daughter. However, this film copies scenes in the original without any apparent understanding of the emotions those scenes were meant to evoke.
The final confrontation is so over-the-top as to be entirely unbelievable. It is padded out with flashbacks, clips from the first film, which just exacerbate the disparity in quality. Also, while the original had a bitter-sweet ending this effort minimises the blood and fatalities in order to make it a happy feel-good film. Not a fitting ending for a classic monster-movie franchise.
A small town in New Jersey is inhabited by fake-tanned twenty-somethings,
as in the uninformative documentary series Jersey Shore.
The main characters are called The Complication and Nooki.
A property-developer wants to gentrify the area. Worse, a giant CGI shark with glowing red eyes starts eating anyone dumb enough to go boating.
Predictably, what lets the film down is the low-budget CGI SPFX. However, it is saved to a certain extent by the fact it is a deliberate self-parody.
Malibu beach is hit by a tidal wave.
A group of goblin sharks are swept along with the water.
The beach attendant (Warren Christie -
Alphas
) tries to save everyone.
The cast includes Peta Wilson as the bitchy boss-lady.
Jessie (
Nicky Whelan
) and her friends vacation on an idyllic island.
Unfortunately they are targeted by a man-eating shark.
The story starts with a US Navy submarine on the floor of the Pacific ocean.
Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham -
Hobbs and Shaw (2019)
) and his elite rescue team take a mini-sub down to save the crew.
Unfortunately the wrecked sub is still under attack
from an unknown source.
Naturally it goes slightly wrong,
and he is assumed to have pressure-induced psychosis - like in
The Abyss (1989)
.
Five years later, chubby middle-aged American tech billionaire Morris (Rainn Wilson - Star Trek: Discovery ) finances a marine biology lab on an oil rig two hundred miles off the coast of China. The diverse crew include Lori ( Jessica McNamee ) and Toshi (Masi Oka - Lost ), who take a mini-sub to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Unfortunately they run into a Megalodon super-shark, part of a species that has been living there for millions of years.
With the sub's crew trapped seven miles down, Mac the station manager (Cliff Curtis - Fear The Walking Dead ) calls in the best deep-sea rescue expert in the world - Jonas. Our hero has retired to live on a beach in Thailand, like in Mechanic: Resurrection . By incredible coincidence, Jonas is Lori's ex-husband so he has a personal motive to help. That said, since their marriage is long-dead he gets a new love interest - Suyin ( Li Bingbing ).
The science station is equipped with high-speed mini-submarines. They actually seem to be quite poorly designed, since the cockpit is a large perspex bubble that is neither hydrodynamic nor easily pressurized. However, they somehow fulfill the mission. Unfortunately, the shark manages to follow the survivors to the surface.
The team go hunting for the Megalodon. Despite having a helicopter, they use a big motor-cruiser instead. Jonas gets picked for most of the daring-do. As a result, the suspense feels fake at best. After all, we know he will be okay until the final climactic scene. Luckily there is a diverse crew of potential shark-fodder, including Jax the wrench-wench ( Ruby Rose ).
Like most shark movies, this borrows heavily from Jaws (1975) . Many parts of it look like an up-dated version, with modern technology both on-screen and behind the scenes. For example, the old shark cage has been replaced with an unbreakable polycarbonate tube. The third act is rife with visual references to the 1970s movie. The underwater shots of seaweed as the shark swims through it. The little fat kid on the beach who wants to go paddling with his inflatable. Potential victims on a raft that gets tugged out to sea. But this movie is hollow and soulless, and lacks the emotional impact of the original.
This starts with a reminder of the Jurassic-era food-chain.
Flies are eaten by lizards,
which are eaten by small amphibious dinosaurs,
which are eaten by Tyranosaurus Rex ...
which are eaten by Megalodons!
All this comes in during the Third Act of the story.
Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham - Hobbs and Shaw (2019) ) and his sidekick Mac (Cliff Curtis - Fear The Walking Dead ) spend their time exposing sailors whose ships are illegally dumping radioactive waste. This is not as fair as targeting the Mega-Corporations responsible, but action-adventure tends towards blue-collar criminals rather than white-collar ones.
Jonas and the crew are based in Red China, working for a Mega-Corp run by Hilary Driscoll ( Sienna Guillory ). The female lead, Jonas' teenage stepdaughter named Meiying, is bilingual. She can speak English with Jonas, and Mandarin (with English subtitles) with her uncle. He has built a bionic EVA suit, which is intended as a deep-sea survival suit. Of course, any Mega-Corporation operating in Red China is probably controlled by the Chinese Communist Party so they will weaponise it and their army will have Starship Troopers 3: Marauders style super-suits.
The Chinese Mega-Corp owns the world's only captive Megalodon. Chinese uncle is trying to tame it. This all seems a bit reminiscent of Deep Blue Sea , even down to the off-shore research installation. Admittedly it was in the original film, but it still looks like everyone involved has a bad case of genre-blindness. This kind of rip-off cannot be noted as a mere genre trope: after a quarter of a century, it is clearly a cliche.
Jonas, the Chinese uncle and the rest of the crew take a couple of mini-subs into the Trench - the feature six kilometres deep where the surviving Megalodons live. They discover that someone else got there first. Is it the radioactive waste dumpers or the Chinese military? No, it is a completely new set of villains - deep-sea divers running an illicit mining operation.
The team end up on the sea bed, six kilometres deep, with nothing but bionic survival suits to save them. They have two hours of air, but there is something better. If Jonas blows all the air out of his sinus cavities, filling them with air, he can apparently survive up to sixty second without a survival suit. This seems to be inspired by The Abyss (1989) , a movie that may be three and a half decades old but still has a more advanced grasp of science. After all, that movie has the diver fill his lungs with a fluid to avoid rapid compression of his chest cavity. After the catastrophic real-life Titanic mini-sub disaster, this is all in very poor taste.
On the surface, Jess ( Skyler Samuels ) is in charge. A team of heavily-armed mercenaries invades the research station.
In the Third Act, Statham and his crew are on the run from the villains. The nearest land is a tourist resort sixty kilometres away, which they row to very quickly. Unfortunately a trio of Megalodons followed them - as well as some amphibious mini-dinosaurs from the prologue.
The moral of the story is that western capitalists are evil, and the Chinese Communist Party must therefore be correct. This film's credited director is Ben Wheatley , best known for a string of arthouse horror movies. How he ended up working on a low-brow action flick that is propaganda for Red China is not explained. Presumably someone was blackmailing him.
A female TV reporter is invited to tour the newest, biggest oil rig in the world.
It is run by a pair of rent-a-villains - Billionaire Robin Sachs (
Buffy
) and safety officer Mark A. Sheppard (
Supernatural
). Strangely, they actually play sympathetic characters for a change.
The Megalodon itself does not appear until half-way through the film. However, this works in the film's favour. Rather than rely on a dodgy FX monster, the film delivers characters and a storyline.
A Russian military submarine drills into the south pacific telephone cable,
so they can tap into international communications.
Unfortunately the vibrations attract a nearby Megalodon,
one of a species of enormous shark that is believed to be extinct.
The shark attacks the submarine, and the Russians get trapped.
A US Navy ship happens to be in the area. They detect the Russian sub, and send a large mini-sub down to investigate. The good news is that they rescue the important Russians - specifically the ones with speaking roles. The bad news is that the shark is still in the area, and swallows the mini-sub.
The US Navy ship has an Admiral (Michael Madsen - Species (1995) ) aboard. He orders the Captain to abandon the mini-sub. This leads to what is meant to be a tense stand-off, like in The Abyss (1989) . The Admiral ends up locked away throughout the Second Act of the story.
The US Navy in this movie have no concept of international relations. They interrogate the Russians, ignoring the danger of creating a diplomatic incident, and threaten to have them imprisoned for espionage. Of course, this is no more nonsensical than anything else in the movie.
In the Third Act, the plot threads all get tied up. The Russians try to escape, so the Admiral is allowed out to fight them. Meanwhile, the engineer builds a bomb to destroy the shark.
This starts with some CGI-heavy shots of the previous movie,
to keep the audience up to date with the story so far.
The USS King, a US Navy warship,
has successfully defeated a Megalodon.
With the Captain dead, Lt Commander Sharp (Eric Roberts -
) now takes command.
However, more CGI megalodons appear and attack the ship.
Since the ship's main weapons seem to have been disabled,
the only defences are a group of Marines (dressed in Navy uniforms)
using a motly assortment of small-arms (but no M4 carbines).
Kristy London ( Jessica Chancellor ) gets a job working for Dr Rylie Clark ( Caroline Williams ) on a disused oil rig off the coast of Hawaii. They are scientists drilling for geothermal energy. The crew includes a token Black guy, who is the technical support, and generic White guy - who comes across as a mansplaining jerk who is reminiscent of Carter Burke in Aliens .
The megalodons besiege the oil rig. Worse, if the geothermal power system is damaged it could cause a tsunami and destroy Hawaii.
This movie marks the 25th anniversary of The Asylum. It is a shame that they apparently never made enough profits to re-invest some money and make better movies.
This is infamous as one of The Asylum’s first movies,
and one of the worst ever made.
In truth, it is better (well, less awful) than most films made by The Asylum.
Yes, this is one of the good ones!
Environmental scientist (and 1980s teenage pop star) Debbie Gibson discovers that global warming is causing the polar ice cap to melt. Unfortunately an enormous megalodon shark and an equally enormous octopus get defrosted and decide to wreak havoc on every ship on the Earth’s oceans.
The Megalodon is on the rampage,
attacking a US battleship by jumping over it repeatedly.
Then it tries to eat the tasty, enormous eggs of Crocosaurus!
This pair of enormous dodgy CGI monsters also eat any people they meet.
US Navy Admiral Robert Picardo ( Star Trek: Voyager ) is out for revenge, so he gets put in charge of the hunt. His expert shark-hunter (a character inspired by Denzel Washington in Hunt for Red October) is joined by his rival, an Australian who hunts crocs for a living.
The world economy is in ruins because the Megalodons have
prevented commerce taking place by sea.
The damn things are so strong they can nose-flip a warship
the way a dolphin nose-flips a beachball!
The US Navy has developed well-armed mini-subs crewed by beautiful women,
but this has limited success.
The Russians are trying to recover by converting their power plants to run on red mercury. A salvage team try to retrieve some from Chernobyl, and accidentally reactivate a nuclear-powered giant robot named Kolossus. It was a last-ditch Cold War weapon, programmed to walk around the main cities of Europe and drop nuclear bomblets.
The action starts with a tug-boat that is towing an iceberg to Alexandria in Egypt.
Over in Hawaii, a scientist (Christopher Judge -
Stargate SG-1
) has built a killer submarine piloted by his wife (
Elizabeth Rohm
). Rather than have an original design, the sub is a giant robotic shark.
There is a vast amount of wasted space inside the sub,
and the pilot's chair is not ergonomic or body-supporting.
However, there is a logical reason for the strange design of the sub -
regular technology seems useless against the shark.
It can flip away torpedoes with its tail every time,
and does so with such accuracy it takes out the nearest US Navy warship!
The shark attacks a hospital ship in the Atlantic, then migrates to Sydney harbour in Australia. En route it attacks an oil-rig, and manages to menace a jetliner (at an altitude of several miles). Luckily, scientist Debbie Gibson phones the Admiral to offer an explanation for the shark's aggressive behaviour. She was hanging around in her laboratory, wearing jewelry and evening-wear instead of a lab coat, when she realised that the shark was sexually frustrated and eager to mate. It seems there is no Giant Octopus around to make another Sharktopus , but at least Ms Rohm still has a giant metal shark ...
Richard Harris (
Cromwell
) is a fisherman in Newfoundland, Canada.
He and his crew, including
Bo Derek
in her acting debut, set sail to catch an Orca.
They make a mess of it,
killing the Orca's pregnant mate instead.
The Orca holds a grudge,
and decides to besiege the island community
until the fisherman sails out to face it again.
A scientist ( Charlotte Rampling ) tags along to help out. She is not much use, as the Orca picks off the crew one at a time.
This was made by Dino De Laurentis as a low-budget Jaws rip-off, with Harris as a Quint-type character aboard an identical-looking boat. In the 1970s Richard Harris made a number of thrillers, such as Juggernaut and Golden Rendezvous, and this fits in well with those. Likewise, Rampling was a known name at the time - although this film's poor reception may not have done her career much good. The film was also mocked in Jaws 2 , by the inclusion of a Killer Whale as one of the shark's victims. However, it is still worth a watch.
Half a dozen tweenagers go to an isolated location.
This time it is a yacht, in the middle of the ocean.
The opening scene is reminiscent of
Triangle
, since the main female character has traumatic memories
and has brought her child with her.
However, there is no supernatural element to the storyline.
This is a drama about real people with real problems, so to speak.
The characters all go for a swim, out of sight of land. Unfortunately nobody bothered to let the ladder down. The men compete to climb back aboard, but since they have greater body mass than the women their attempts fail. And while the men try to fix the problem, the women prefer to fix the blame. Gradually things get more and more desperate.
This is basically
Waterworld
with sharks, courtesy of The Asylum.
Not only has global warming melted the icecaps and drowned the continents,
it has also killed the plankton and altered the food chain.
Humans survive on a series of floating structures,
but the sharks are starving and must visit the surface to feed.
The sharks have unified in a single swark, led by a massive alpha female. The lady scientists have a plan. If they lure the sharks over a volcano and force an eruption, it should take out the threat. This will also cause a tsunami.
The main plan is to end global warming by launching a CO2 scrubber into the atmosphere with a rocket. Unfortunately the launch platform is unstable so time is of the essence. Will the scrubber manage to reverse climate change and lower the sea level a hundred feet within six months? More importantly, will there still be enough hot women to repopulate the world?
Five fun-seekers head off to an isolated location.
They end up getting stalked and picked off, one at a time.
The twist is that, like in the film
Open Water
, the victims are swimming off the Great Barrier Reef
and instead of being bumped off by a serial killer
they are targeted by a great white shark.
This is a great example of a suspenseful drama. The threat of the sharks is ever-present, but rarely seen.
A group of young Australian women go kayaking together
in the waters around a remote island chain.
Unfortunately a large CGI shark is in the area,
so it starts to stalk them.
They know that a shark is in the area,
but rather than stick together they leave the weakest one behind
so she can be shark-bait.
The lead character is afraid to go back into the water. Not because of something that happened to her in her favourite extreme sports - kayaking, snorkling or spear-fishing - but because her sister was drowned in a bath-tub. Every time she goes underwater, she imagines what her sister's death must have felt like. This is all a bit of a stretch, but at least it gives her a bit of a character arc.
This was written and directed by Andrew Traucki , the same guy as the original film, but apart from the thematic link the films have nothing to do with each other. At least the style is similar - a preference for suspense with the shark kept off-screen, and the use of wildlife footage of a real shark when possible. The only thing that really lets this film down is the CGI shots, which make it look cheaper and nastier than it ought to.
A great white shark swallows an alien space probe
that turns it into a cyborg.
It can swim through solid ground, like the
Sand Sharks
but even less convincing.
The shark threatens the city of Seattle, USA. Luckily, there is a well-intentioned scientist in a unit commanded by a trigger-happy US Navy Admiral. They also have a Billionaire named Bill Glates.
The movie contains a constant bombardment of pop-culture references. Too many to count, pretty much every other line.
The scientist's daughter discovers that the shark is plugged into social media. It even tries to communicate by twitter emoji. Eventually she decodes its message as Roboshark phone home.
Roboshark heads for the Space Needle, which it plans to use as an antenna so it can broadcast its signal to the mothership.
This is predictable low-budget crap,
filled with bikini babes and low-grade CGI monsters.
The plot is not dissimilar to that of
Jaws (1975)
.
The sheriff calls in a shark expert - but this one does not look like Richard Dreyfus ( Close Encounters of the Third Kind ). No, she is a buxom blonde who dresses like Lara Croft .
The beach gets closed. But sleazy-yet-likeable Corin Nemec ( Stargate SG-1 ) wants to host a beach party, so he does everything he can to keep the beach open. Eventually (predictably) the party happens - with literally dozens (well, two dozen perhaps) of college spring breakers turning up to get eaten alive.
The CGI SPFX are terrible. But the one-liners are okay, and the characters are quite compelling.
This is a European production,
mostly set and filmed in Ireland
but co-financed by Belgium and Sweden.
Although the three main leads are not Irish,
the two Brits do decent accents ... The American one not so much.
A young science student ( Hermione Corfield ) becomes a passenger on a fishing vessel so she can complete her research. Just as well, because it turns out the crew is in dire need of a scientist.
The Captain (Dougray Scott - Mission Impossible 2 ) and First Officer ( Connie Nielsen ) are warned by the Irish Coastguard to avoid a specific zone that has been marked as excluded. The official story is that whales are breeding there, and there are indeed whales in the area, but this is unusual because whales normally avoid busy fishing areas.
The Captain secretly transgresses by taking the ship through the excluded zone. They get attacked by an undersea monster, which has multiple tendrils that excrete eggs. Not only do the crew now have to worry about the main monster, they also have to check if they are infected - like in The Thing (1982) .
This movie got bad word-of-mouth because people went to see
The Reef
and end up watching a
Sharknado
rip-off.
In all fairness, The Shallows starts out pretty well. It is decently shot and paced, with a lot of suspense. The protagonist ( Blake Lively ) goes surfing in a remote bay in Mexico. Unfortunately she ends up getting stalked by a great white shark.
The problem is that suspension of disbelief is stretched beyond credulity. A real taster bite would have taken a massive chunk of muscle tissue out. She might have had the limb actually severed. Apparently Benchley had the right idea when he wrote the first attack scene in Jaws (1975) from the victim's POV. She feels something tug at her leg, and then discovers the limb missing. The prosthetic leg idea might have gone some way to making the film seem a bit less unrealistic.
Worse, the Third Act makes Sharknado look like Jaws (1975) ! The quality may be umpteen generations of computer technology better, but it was completely overused. The trick Spielberg learned from Jaws was don't show too much of the shark. This director seems to have ignored that.
This is a typical pandemic-era movie,
with a tiny cast in an isolated location.
That might be standard in a horror movie,
but this movie just feels so generic in that regard
because so many similar-feeling films have come out at the same time.
Five American tweenagers are on vacation in the tropics. They go out to sea on a couple of jet-skis, but while messing about they cripple both craft. Now there are five people in the water. Shark's in the water ...
The movie works well enough when the shark is off-screen. As with Jaws , it is very suspenseful due to the less-is-more approach. However, when the shark itself is on-screen it becomes apparent how comically oversized it is. That, even more than the abnormal feeding behaviour, is the most obvious (and bad) thing about this.
A female cop (
Sara Malakul Lane
) chases after a smuggler (Dolph Lungren -
Universal Soldier
) who specialises in exotic animals.
Five years later the smuggler is still on the run and the cop has adopted his pre-teen daughter. The bad news is, the bull shark starts to eat people.
The obvious comparison for this movie is with Jaws (1975) . It certainly makes enough references to it.
A shoal of twenty THOUSAND sharks are swimming up the Mexican coast towards California.
In the worst timing ever their arrival gets combined with a hurricane
that leaves Los Angeles knee-deep in water ...
and lifts the sharks into the middle of town!
Middle-aged surf bums Fin (Ian Ziering - 90210) and Jaason Simmons (Baywatch) team up with a Barfly (John Heard - Cat People ) and a sexy shotgun-toting waitress, Nova Clarke ( Cassie Scerbo ). Fin decides to save his ex-wife April ( Tara Reid ) and teenage daughter. Naturally they end up taking on the sharks - using a chainsaw!
Despite its ridiculous premise, this is an entertaining film. It never promises more than it delivers.
Fin (Ian Ziering) and April (
Tara Reid
) have written a book about their experiences in the first film,
and are on an route to NYC as part of their book tour.
Fin has a Twilight zone moment as he looks out the window and sees something on the wing!
The plane flies straight into yet another sharknado, which is bad news for air hostess
Kelly Osborne
. Luckily the laws of science do not apply,
allowing Reid to hang out the door one-handed taking potshots at the sharks with an air marshal's pistol
while Ziering lands a 747 in a tornado while not having any flight training.
Once on the ground, things do not get any better. Rather than use guns, the New Yorkers are encouraged to take on the sharks with gardening implements. While this is foolhardy when the fish are airborne, it makes sense once they get stranded on dry land. Of course, the fish would suffocate without water, so a quicker cleanup would involve a bulldozer to scoop them all up before they start to rot. Sharks are an endangered group of species, BTW, so slaughtering them by the hundred would be highly illegal.
The best sequence has got to be the one from the trailer, where Ziering chainsaws a Great White as it flies past him, almost completely avoiding splattering himself with blood.
However, despite its lack of logic this is quite an enjoyable effort. Kari Wuhrer makes a return to genre material as Ziering's sister, trekking across NYC to safety in a typically contrived plot. The CGI is passable, and the dialogue is not all atrocious. In fact, one might surmise that this had a higher budget that the original, although the extra money never gets spent on the script.
For saving both Los Angeles and New York City from shark-filled tornados,
Fin (Ian Ziering) gets presented with a medal by the US President.
It must be a Republican administration, because the Prez is white and the Veep is
Ann Coulter
. Even the infamous Michelle Bachmann gets to show her face.
There are some Liberal cameos too -
George RR Martin
faces off against a flying shark.
Ziering teams up with Nova Clarke ( Cassie Scerbo ) and Lucas Stevens (Frankie Muniz - Malcolm in the Middle). They must get from Washington DC to Florida, where Ziering's wife ( Tara Reid ) is hanging out with her mother ( Bo Derek ). There are lots more cameos, usually involving familiar faces getting eaten by flying sharks.
To stop the sharknados, the heroes must reactivate the Space Shuttle and fly into space. Luckily, Ziering's father (David Hasslehoff - Piranha 3-DD ) is a retired NASA astronaut!
The title parodies the film
The Force Awakens
, released around the same time,
and opens with a Star Wars title crawl to give exposition.
It has been a year since the last sharknado. A sharknado-themed hotel in Las Vegas has been built.
Fin (Ian Ziering) and April (
Tara Reid
) take their son to London. They are the official US delegates at a NATO conference.
Before it starts, Fin is called off to help Nova Clarke (
Cassie Scerbo
) explore caves under Stonehenge.
She has discovered cave paintings, like those in
Prometheus
, which tell of sharknados in ancient times.
As they explore the caves, they encounter a
Raiders Of The Lost Ark
scenario. They even find a skeleton with a bullwhip and fedora!
April and her son visit the MI6 HQ, where they meet the lo-budget version of Q. He has invented a few things that will probably be important to the plot later on.
The good guys go on a quest to end the sharknados for once and all. Unfortunately they get bumped off one at a time. However, the ending involves time-travel so there is a chance the story might get tied up in the next movie.
Fin (Ian Ziering) arrives back in the Jurassic era.
There are no Sharknados, but there is a Megalodon!
Luckily he finds some old allies to help save the world.
April (
Tara Reid
) and Nova Clarke (
Cassie Scerbo
) are back from the dead, saved by Fin's time-travelling son Gil.
The heroes must time-travel forward, defeating each historical sharknado.
The good news is that their time-machine is a badge pinned to Fin's chest.
The bad news is that they must somehow accelerate to 88 miles per hour
in order to enter the time portal in each period.
At Camelot they get help from Merlin (Neil deGrasse Tyson - Stargate: Atlantis ) and Winter ( Marina Sirtis ).
In the American Revolutionary War, the heroic British have weaponised the sharknado. The protagonists take the side of King George Washington. Nova meets her distant ancestor. Her secret plan is exposed - she wants to alter history and save her grandfather.
In the Wild West the protagonists get caught between Billy the Kid and a crazy sheriff. For some reason a sharknado strikes the town, even though New Mexico is a desert a thousand miles from the sea. Luckily Skye ( Vivica A. Fox ) is in town to help out.
In the 1950s, a reporter (Gilbert Gottfried - ) is covering a surfing event when it is hit by the sharknado. The protagonists meet Fin's mother Raye ( Tori Spelling ) and father Gilly (Dean McDermott - ), before they got married. Meanwhile, Fin is losing his son Gil who has gotten older in every time-jump.
In 1997, Nova tries to save her grandfather again. Of course, it all goes horribly wrong. Fin and Skye get catapulted twenty thousand years into the future, where the human species is extinct and the Earth is ruled by robots. Yes, it is the Planet of the Aprils!
Finally the survivors get to the smuggler's ship from the prologue to the first film. If they end the first sharknado, the cycle will be broken.
This starts with a paddle-boarder on an American beach,
before she gets targeted by a hungry shark.
The attack does not rely on CGI, which is a good thing.
Instead it cobbles in what appears to be some stock footage of a shark,
which is the old-school equivalent.
Michael Madsen ( ) stays at home while his tweenage daughter heads off. She is a model, so she accompanies her photographer and make-up girl on a kayak trip to a remote tropical atol. The bad news is they get stranded on the island, waiting for the tide to come in. The good news is that Daddy is a search-and-rescue specialist who can coordinate things on his cell-phone.
This was directed by Jarred Cohn , who is also listed as the cinematographer. At least someone else is credited as the writer, so it is not just a one-man-band. That said, all the hallmarks of a cheap movie are here. There is a tiny cast, mostly unknowns, while the only recognisable star is kept in one location so they probably shot all his scenes on one afternoon. The use of dodgy CGI is only mitigated by the use of old-fashioned stock footage, so the effects are not exactly spectacular. Even the cinematography is lacking, since the director seems incapable of keeping the focus of interest in the centre of the screen.
This is set in Dixieland, USA,
where a corrupt businessman oppresses the poor folk.
The villain has his henchmen flood the trailer park.
Worse than the tidal wave,
a great white shark is swept into the lagoon.
Worse still, this is not a normal shark ...
it has the super-power of electrocuting its victims as they try to swim away.
Luckily, one of the trailer trash is Tara Reid . In a reference to Sharknado , she tries using a chainsaw against the shark. The cast also includes her American Pie co-star, Thomas Ian Nicholas.
This was filmed on location in Louisiana, on a SyFy TV budget. It looks like parts of it were filmed during the CoVid lockdown of 2020 - few scenes are shot with more than one person on screen at a time, and at least one of the characters has a mask on his face at all times.
The two title monsters in
MegaShark vs Giant Octopus
were not FIGHTING ... They were f*cking!
And this is the result.
Down on the beaches of beautiful Mexico, hot bikini-babes indulge in seaside pursuits like metal-detecting and bungee-jumping. Roger Corman is a lecherous old man who drools over them. Unfortunately there is a CGI monster, half shark and half octopus, that can get into the shallowest waters ...
Eric Roberts ( Expendables ) is the mad scientist who genetically engineered Sharktopus. He hires a tweenage cabin-boy in a motor-cruiser to hunt and capture the monster. Apparently the kid is an ex-SEAL who served in Iraq or something. He barely looks old enough to shave!
Oil Company CEO John Schneider (
Smallville
) orders drilling in deep waters.
The result is that a massive shark is driven to the surface,
and starts to cause a nuisance.
It can breath air somehow,
so it can launch itself onto the beach and flop around long enough
to do serious damage to any bikini-clad hotties
who are bouncing around within camera-shot.
The US Military send in an experimental new tank. It was apparently built for mountainous regions of Afghanistan, so it can walk across the desert like an armour-plated camel. Now, a normal tank can cross the desert without problems, so something with legs has no real advantage. Worse, this particular prototype turns out to have an issue with overheating. Not something you look for in a vehicle designed to operate in combat in hot environments.
Kirsty Swanson
claims that a giant CGI shark is swimming around the Louisiana Bayou, eating people.
Sheriff Robert Davi (
Licence to Kill
) claims it is only a man-eating alligator.
Of course, he is corrupt and the monster is (predictably) his fault.
Luckily Kirsty meets DB Sweeney ( Strange Luck, The Event ), who helps her hunt the monster down.
A zombie shark starts to eat people.
Luckily, Jason London (
Mallrats
) is a mercenary who does security work for the local secret lab.
