Shark Encounters of the Third Kind
"The neighbors said to call the harbor patrol...is that like a real place?" - Kay
release year: 2020
genre: shark cheese
viewing setting: home streaming 11/23/23 (a very special Thanksgiving!)
synopsis: Aliens show up to a remote group of islands, and mess with both people and sharks.
impressions: These are the same people who brought us, among other things, Sharkenstein. That means a cardboard shark moving across the screen at some points, so for special effects it's gonna be a "D" rating. But...this one was actually a little better than most Wild Eye productions - it had some semblance of a coherent plot, and a lot of humorous moments. Some of those, in rough order of appearance: a diver in a wreck having a monologue to himself...aliens with big goofy heads and eyes made out of old ping-pong balls...the aliens observing as the shark eats someone...an astronaut and his ship being destroyed in space as the aliens arrive...a shark hissing...Jaws-like music...a severed head...a guy having flashbacks to his abduction, mostly while in his geek-man-cave home...a random dork trying to talk to the aliens...the aliens kidnapping and apparently shrinking a shark...re-use of footage to pad the running time...a possessed mom...a crazy cat lady...a shark being killed with a flare gun...the possessed mom going lethal...an alien being killed and then just re-appearing shortly thereafter...a sunken UFO...a shark managing to kill an alien...homemade depth charges...a warning/truce from the aliens a la The Abyss...a random bonus death at the end...cool synth music. Overall...I think what was supposed to be going on here was that these aliens had some some abductions in the area in the past, and had now decided they were done with Earth and were tying up their loose ends. But it's hard to say, really; figuring it out would be a waste of precious brain power.
body count: 5 by sharks (1 was an assist by the aliens) and 3 by aliens, plus 1 by possessed mom, plus 1 shark, plus several other people, aliens, and sharks (it got confusing because it wasn't clear if those already killed had returned)
acting: Jennie Russo is the main woman, and does okay. Everyone else in this movie was less, shall we say, practiced in the art of acting. That's the best I can do, really.
overheard from reviewers:
"So she's like a therapist...for alien abductees?"
final word: Watchable but very low-budget shark cheese.
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