Directed by: Brett Kelly
Starring: Emanuelle Carriere, Christine Emes, Celine Filion, Angela Parent, Duncan Milloy, Phil Dukarsky, Kyle Martellacci, Joshua Gilbert Crosby, Kevin Preece, Jurgen Vollrath, Kala Gray, Sherry Thurig
Steven Spielberg is normally a pretty smart cookie when it comes to hitting on winning box office concepts, so how the hell did he miss out on the idea of combining the themes of two of his biggest hits, Jaws and Jurassic Park, into one amazing movie entitled… Jurassic Shark?
Unfortunately for us all, it was probably because director Brett Kelly nipped in there first instead. We’re not talking about the Brett Kelly who played the annoying fat kid in Bad Santa, we mean the Canadian filmmaker who gave the world the likes of My Fair Zombie, an Attack of the Giant Leeches remake, and Spacemen, Go-go Girls and the Great Easter Hunt, and never had the good grace to apologise.
This is a man you wouldn’t even trust to direct traffic, but he still somehow manages to churn out bad movies by the bucketload. Not that he seems to spend much money on them – this one looks so cheap that Borassic Shark might have been a more appropriate title.
Like Spielberg, Kelly keeps his monster hidden at the start as it gulps down a pair of vastly irritating bimbos in bikinis. Their acting is so wooden that I’m surprised the shark didn’t get splinters between its teeth.
The attack by the unseen monster is poorly intercut with a scene of two equally bad actors in white coats shouting at each other. It seems they are involved in drilling for oil in the same tourist lake where the gals are in the process of being swallowed up, and the argument (which sounds to have been recorded in an echo chamber) is over the fact that one of them, a scientist, is worried that they might have drilled too deep. The other, a greedy oil boss, doesn’t give a toss of course.
Silly sod. The repercussions of drilling too deep are obvious, even to the layman: whenever you make a big hole at the bottom of a lake, especially one that’s only three feet deep, you risk opening the door to a 50 foot Megalodon shark that has been stuck underneath the lake’s bottom for a gazillion years or so.
Would you Adam and Eve it? That’s just what happens, too. It transpires the shark was frozen in a block of ice, like Walt Disney, which explains its chipper state when finally being freed. What the monster has been eating for millions of years is anybody’s guess, but it certainly makes up for lost noshing time once it gets loose.
Meanwhile, in a suitably inane plot twist, a bunch of criminals have hidden a priceless stolen painting at the bottom of the lake. Not the most sensible move, especially since it’s a watercolour. I love the way that the leader of the gang – who are all dressed in black so the audience don’t get confused – describes their audacious art robbery and daring getaway in great detail, saving money on actually having to show it.
Once the baddies find out there’s a Jurassic Shark on the premises they round up the worst actors in the vicinity and march them at gunpoint to dive down to retrieve the painting for them. This doesn’t go well for said bad actors, who are thankfully put out of their misery in short order as the shark bites down on them with a noise akin to crunching an apple.
The heroine of the show is a crusading lady journalist out to expose the fact that the oil company are money-grubbing – as opposed to the ones who are in it for philanthropic reasons. She and her bikini-clad college friends end up as prisoners of the robbers, trapped on an island in the middle of the lake.
When we do actually get to see the shark, we wish the hell we hadn’t. Forget CGI, this bad boy looks like he was created in Photoshop by a five-year-old, and the scene where it flies out of the water to chomp one of the baddies in half on land has got to be one of the most laughably poor effects ever seen. In other scenes the makers utilise mismatched stock footage of real sharks, much smaller ones of course, and what appears to be a giant cardboard cutout!
In the end the bikini-clad babes take on the remaining bad guys in a handbags-at-dawn punch-up where the guns and dynamite of the art thieves prove no match for one strategically lobbed rock. During this badly choreographed battle one of the gunmen aims at a girl offscreen to the left while her friend runs in and clubs him with a branch from the right. Another camera angle reveals that there wasn’t a girl to his left in the first place – don’t you just hate it when that happens?
Inept in every single way, Jurassic Shark comes very close to being the Citizen Kane of s#!tty shark movies and it actually holds the dubious honour of being the lowest rated movie on IMDB. If that’s not enough of a recommendation to see it, we don’t know what is.
