Jurassic Shark
someone: "What was that thing?"
someone else: "It looked like a shark."
first someone: "I have never seen a shark that big and ugly before."
release year: 2012
genre: shark horror
viewing setting: home streaming 10/23/26
synopsis: Poor decision-making leads to a prehistoric shark ending up in a lake, where it proceeds to randomly devour everyone it can.
impressions: This was a Wild Eye production, a fact which always makes me groan in pain before a movie even starts...but this one was actually better than other Wild Eye crapfests I sat through in the past. There were several groups of people running around - mainly some robbers on the run and some students - and then suddenly there's this shark in the lake and people start getting eaten. But...BUT...as I often do with cheap shark movies, I have to bitch about the fact that A GIANT SHARK CANNOT SWIM AND EAT PEOPLE IN WATER THAT'S ANKLE-DEEP, KNEE-DEEP, OR EVEN WAIST-DEEP. For fuck's sake, it happened at least five times in this movie alone! Stop doing this, cheap shark movie creators of the world...if you want your shark to be huge, then it needs to roam in deep water and its victims need to be swimming or boating in the same deep water. And it was even worse because the fucking thing was supposed to be a megalodon, which is a really big prehistoric shark. Those were fifty feet or longer, which means they'd be at least ten feet high from belly to back, which means they simply wouldn't fit in water a few feet deep. Dammit, people, you need to start getting this right in your shark movies. Other nonsense found here: the entire goal of the thieves made no sense because priceless paintings aren't waterproof...the shark jumped out of the water and over two potential victims to get someone else...it also barked at one point. I'll just stop there.
body count: 11 by shark, 1 by dynamite, plus 1 shark
acting: Nothing spectacular here. Emanuelle Carriere is the main smart girl, and Christine Emes is her friend who apparently has no brain for most of the movie and then gets super-motivated and -competent near the end. Angela Parent is the cocky, smart-ass leader of the robbers. Phil Dukarsky is a sneering robber who likes to wave a gun around. Duncan Milloy is a big, jacked, weird robber. The shark...well, it was passable CGI but no way was it bigger than about twenty feet, and certainly no Megalodon. (Trust me, I've seen Megalodons and this wasn't one.)
final word: Low-budget shark fare which was fine as a shark movie but should NOT have been advertised as a megalodon movie.
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