Review – Fear Below

The parts with the shark in it were fun. The rest of it was a vaguely unsatisfying 1930s era caper movie about divers trying to recover stolen gold from a van at the bottom of a muddy river. The acting and production values were good enough. Even the script was okay. It’s just that most of the story didn’t do much beyond bridging the gaps between moments when the shark swam in out of the murk and bit someone. Mildly amusing

Review – Meg 2: The Trench

I wish I had a better understanding of the plot structures and other conventions of Chinese action movies. Like the original, this was fairly obviously made to screen on both sides of the Pacific without a lot of regional adjustment for either market. I guess the assumption was that Chinese audiences would expect silly characters and an episodic, fragmentary story, and US audiences wouldn’t care as long as they got plenty of giant sharks. If you liked the first one, well, they made you another one. See if desperate

Review – Black Demon

It’s like they aren’t even trying anymore. Sure, it’s a giant extinct shark that’s also a Mesoamerican demon. But shouldn’t it also be a tornado, or part giant octopus, or at least radioactive? This thing’s barely powerful enough to keep an executive, his family and a couple of workers trapped on a decrepit oil rig for long enough to let them bicker extensively. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Sharksploitation

As the name implies, this documentary chronicles the decline and fall of the shark sub-genre from Hollywood blockbuster to high-band cable staple. I found the interviews with actual oceanographers fascinating, but the reminiscences from the directors of Syfy Channel schlockfests were less so. Students of mass media will likely find this a fascinating portrait of how something that makes money will inspire imitators and relentlessly devolve. Mildly amusing

Review – The Requin

The quotes section of this movie’s IMDb page includes only two entries, one of which is “Jaelyn: [fending off a shark] That’s right motherfucker.” That bit of Shakespearian wit is sadly indicative of the quality of the production as a whole. An American couple on a beach vacation in Southeast Asia find themselves adrift when their hut – which floats for some reason – gets swept out to sea in a storm. The title is literally French for “shark,” and yet the thing’s two thirds done before any killer fish put in an appearance. Which is good, because when they do show up they take the form of old stock footage and tragically terrible CGI. The closest this ever comes to entertaining is one character’s remark that he’s “gonna expect a discount on the room.” If memory serves, that’s also borrowed from the Bard of Avon, the last thing Duncan says before Macbeth stabs him. See if desperate

Review – Toxic Shark

I’ve actually started feeling sorry for the actors in Syfy shark movies. They take tons of theatre classes, spend time on the stage performing in everything from serious dramas to musicals, move to California, work service industry jobs and wait for their big breaks. And then comes the day when they get to call home and say, “Mom, I got a job! I’m in a movie about chemically contaminated sharks that have things on their heads that shoot toxic goo on people. So my character is either going to get eaten or turned into a 28-Days-Later-style goo zombie.” But take heart, aspiring thespians. Celebrities from Jennifer Aniston to Renee Zellweger got their starts making sludge like this. See if desperate

Review – 47 Meters Down: Uncaged

The first 47 Meters Down had a couple of things going for it: a simple story and a handful of good jump scares. This one can’t even do that much. The plot in particular is an elaborate mess about teenage girls getting trapped in an underwater cave network infested with blind cave sharks. The closest I came to being entertained by this was when I somehow managed to accidentally turn on the audio descriptions for visually atypical audience members. Hearing a calm voice recounting what I was watching at least confirmed that the dreadfulness wasn’t an optical illusion. See if desperate

Review – The Meg

This is the most time, energy and attention I've ever seen devoted to a super-giant shark movie. Usually they're more the province of the SyFy channel. In this one even the explanations are elaborate, building in temperature inversions at the bottom of the ocean to explain how a 60-foot-long predator could exist without ever coming into contact with humans. The movie packs a few scary moments, sadly offset by some unnecessarily sad bits. This is also impressively well tailored to make a seamless transition to Chinese media markets, which I found more interesting than the story itself. See if desperate

Review – 47 Meters Down

Here’s a movie for anyone who ever wanted to watch Jaws but didn’t feel like wading through all that pesky plot and character development. Take two vapid sisters, stick ’em in a shark cage, lure in some great whites, then break the winch and drop the cage the title depth down to the sea floor. Then let the improbable plot twists roll! Every once in awhile the sharks provide a good scare. Otherwise this wavers between annoying and dull. See if desperate

Review – Red Water

Add this to the list of sentences I never thought I’d type: this movie needed way more crappy animated shark. As bad as the SyFy effects are, they’re still a birthday present compared to the characters and dialogue. The best moments of the movie are boosted from previous killer fish pictures (Jaws and Piranha in particular), and most of it isn’t even that good. Though he was never one of my favorite actors, Lou Diamond Philips has begun to make me sad. If a role like this is beneath his dignity, that should give you some idea of where the rest of the production lies on the quality scale. See if desperate

Review – Sand Sharks

I’m not too surprised to learn that Jaws 2 and Tremors hooked up, but I’m a little disappointed to learn that the union produced such an ass stupid child. The monsters here aren’t actual sand sharks (which are cool and scary and thus could never have been the villains in something as deliberately awful as this). Rather, they’re CGI (if it isn’t an insult to computers to use the term for such creations) sharks that swim around in sand as if it were water. Realizing that they were incapable of making something good, the producers of this flop opted for farce. The result stops just short of having the beasts tempt their victims with offers of Candygrams. See if desperate

Review – Shark Night

Of late I find my quest for good horror movies is turning into an ever-less-successful effort to simply avoid the latest variation on the Saw torture porn theme. So I figured I’d be safe with a movie about sharks, who are of course better known for eating people than for tormenting them for pleasure. It never occurred to me that rubes might create their own shark-filled swamp and videotape while their pets devoured hapless twentysomethings, thus turning the story into the very thing I was hoping to avoid. See if desperate

Review – Jaws: The Revenge

I don’t know what I did to bring vengeance this harsh down on myself, but whatever it was I hope I’ve done sufficient penance now. On the other hand, after Jaws 3 “terrible” is a relative thing. This time around the shark is even more fake than ever, and at least in spots the editing appears to have been done by someone completely unfamiliar with the script. But the most serious problem here is the story itself. The shark (or perhaps “a shark” would be more appropriate, as the sharks died at the end of all three previous episodes) follows the last remaining members of the Brody family all the way down to the Bahamas – using its psychic shark powers, I guess – to finish off the last remaining characters from the series (particularly poor Lorraine Gary, the only cast member to last this long). See if desperate

Review – Deep Blue Sea

Hollywood takes a serious swim in shark-infested waters for the first time since Jaws (to which there is a brief license-plate homage early in the film). In order to avoid falling into the just-another-rubber-shark movie pit that trapped the Jaws sequels and a handful of other pictures, the filmmakers came up with a couple of gimmicks: the sharks are played by a combination of expensive life-sized models and computer graphics, and the beasts are supposed to have been made super-intelligent by medical research. The result is a film with a great deal of high-quality gore and enough deep bass in the soundtrack that if you see it in a theater with decent speakers it will take your innards back to the halcyon days of Sensurround. However, it goes without saying that there’s a big old bunch of animal suffering and death along the way. Mildly amusing

Review – Jaws 3

Between Lou Gossett, Dennis Quaid and Lea Thompson, there’s gotta be enough money to buy up all the prints of this barker and make sure nobody ever sees it again. At least Quaid and Thompson can argue that they were relative unknowns at this point; Gossett had been nominated for an Oscar before picking up a thoroughly unconvincing southern accent and employing it herein. If you’re watching this third Jaws movie (connected to the first two by the slenderest of threads) on video, part of the reason that everything looks out of focus is that the original theatrical release was in 3-D. Quick hint for movie people everywhere: 3-D equals stinkaroo. There are exceptions to this rule, but they’re few and far between. And this definitely isn’t one of them. It’s hard to say what’s cheaper, the script or the effects. Decisions, decisions. See if desperate

Review – Jaws 2

I guess after the first big-ass shark movie the studio felt like they needed to get a sequel into theaters as quickly as possible. That would explain why they’d release a film with this many continuity errors and other technical slip-ups. Sure, they got some of the original cast members back (notable absences include Richard Dreyfus and Robert Shaw, though of course Shaw’s twin excuses were that his character died in the original and the actor himself passed on in the interim between movies). Sloppy work and weak script aside, this flick’s most serious failing is the rubber fish, which they set ablaze early on. I suppose the burn scars were supposed to make it look scarier, but ultimately they just make it look even more fakey. Roy Scheider does his best, but in the end even he can’t save this one from the ranks of the mediocre thriller. Mildly amusing

Review – Jaws

Stephen Spielberg does an excellent job adapting Peter Benchley’s novel for the screen. Of course, he’s got a running start thanks to the casting director, with Roy Scheider (as the everyman protagonist), Richard Dreyfus (as the nerdy scientist) and Robert Shaw (as the crusty old fisherman) all turning in outstanding performances. Even the now-legendary soundtrack plays a major part. Of course, by now much of the drama has become cliché, and the big rubber shark doesn’t compare favorably with the effects work Hollywood is doing now. But when it first came out, it was the film everyone in grade school wanted to see, and the one film our parents wouldn’t let us attend until we were older. Worth seeing