Blood Bite
good scientist: "What the...what is this?"
bad CEO: "Blood shark! Can you imagine it? When tourists see them, they'll go wild."
release year: 2020
genre: shark action/adventure
viewing setting: home streaming 12/17/23
synopsis: At some sort of marine facility, an evil CEO and his scientists are somehow modifying a shark...but then things get out of control.
impressions: This was another Chinese imitation of one or more American movies (if you must know, the company is called ITN and their logo appears at the beginning of all their movies.) So other movies from these people were pretty good, with excellent CGI and a minimum of stupidity. This one...not so good. It was clearly trying to channel Deep Blue Sea but it didn't do a great job, plus there was a lot of human drama going on that slowed things down (and padded the running time.) Remote marine base that's nearly empty? Check. Scientist falling in water and then being used as battering ram to break giant underwater window? Check. Diver not afraid to get in the water with the shark? Check. Complex gradually flooding? Check. Shark planning tactics and knocking out cameras? Check. They even copied the idea of a huge storm coming, although it never showed up. Overall, I suspect that ITN was still working out some of the kinks when they made this one, or maybe they let their B-team do it for the practice. Anyway, some notable elements included: roaring, jumping shark...ill-prepared shark hunters...a sequence at the beginning that made no sense in the overall scope of things and then GOT RE-USED, WITHOUT EDITING, AT THE END OF THE MOVIE, with no explanation...little or no choerent explanations for some events...a spilled test tube that doesn't seem to have relevance...a random hologram of a shark...an evil CEO...his brother who does very little except call the evil brother "Bro"...the shark being just fine when completely out of the water for a long while...the injection causing the shark to turn red, as if it had a really bad sunburn...lots of idiotic human drama going on...the sunburned shark gaining the power to regenerate...the sunburned shark changing size to conveniently fit the scene...lots of whining characters near the end...random chick talk to pad the time...multiple stupid characters falling overboard...some silly side plot about the one guy's wounded leg and how it's regenerating...some of the slowest swimmers in the world...bad CGI...all the other, normal sharks turning on the sunburned shark for no apparent reason. I guess that came from Meg. I can't go on anymore. I just can't.
acting: Once again, the credits (and IMDB) don't have names that allow me to know which actors and actresses played which characters. I will say that several of them stood out - the evil CEO being a total ass to everyone, the whiny main hero guy being insecure and weak, the fearless diver girl always being cheerful and optimistic, the evil CEO's brother badly over-using the term "Bro", literally enough times that if you made a drinking game for him, no one would make it through the entire movie...yeah.
overheard from reviewers:
"I don't know what's going on. I'm not sure anybody does. Including the director."
"Look, they're re-using the same crappy footage from before."
"It's a low-budget movie...of course it's crap!"
final word: Watchable, but not great; there are far better monster movies from this ITN company.
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