Frivolous spending in Best Buy's DVD section = X-E movie review.

I can't fault Shark Swarm for being what it is -- a lightweight "shark attack" movie produced for the Hallmark Channel without much gore or many frights. It was constructed as the world's first "shark attack" family movie; a genre which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but is actually sorta cool in a roundabout, alternate universe kind of way.

It's just that I had no idea about any of that when I bought the Shark Swarm DVD this week. I thought it was going to be a soulless, hopeless, blood and tits direct-to-DVD shitfest, and boy was I wrong. (Judging from the DVD cover, I don't think you could blame me for having this assumption.) While watching it last night, it took me a while to figure out that all of the random fadeouts and lack of cussing meant that it was originally a TV movie.

The film follows a predictable formula, which isn't to say that it's not convoluted. Recalling the plot from memory alone, it went something like this: Evil developer wants to buy a small fishing town and transform it into an elite, upscale community filled with ritzy condominiums. To help persuade the locals into selling their homes, he dumps toxins into the water to poison the fish and ruin their only steady stream of income. Stay with me, here. As a byproduct of the toxins and lack of fish, the sharks go bananas and start working in unison, hunting like pack wolves and eating everyone they can get their teeth into. They stole my idea!!

The town's only hope lies with a few characters played by people you would recognize -- John Schneider and Daryl Hannah, namely. Interestingly, I spent the whole movie thinking that the person playing Daryl Hannah's character looked an awful lot like Daryl Hannah, but I never quite made it to the conclusion that it actually was Daryl Hannah. Imagine my surprise when I inspected the DVD case closer, and right there in big letters, there it was: DARYL HANNAH.

There's some charm to the film, but I don't think I can recommend it. Since it was created as a two-part TV movie, it's needlessly long at 164 minutes. That's over two and a half hours, and it's important to note that the sharks factor into maybe ten minutes of that. Thus, it becomes a film with that intangible "movie that WILL NOT END" syndrome, and believe me when I say that you'll be ready to cash out long before it gets interesting.

The sharks, for their part, are pretty bleh. During the shots where we just see sharks randomly swimming around, the CG is pretty good. (Yes, it's all CG -- I honestly don't believe they used a single piece of actual stock shark footage, let alone a custom scene with real sharks. They even excluded the patented fake-fin-above-water trick.)

It's when the sharks attack that the problems start. For one, we rarely see the sharks actually bite anything. They always cut away to a reaction shot before that happens, or they do an instant time lapse to go from Point A (shark roving towards its meal) to Point B (fifty gallons of Cherry Gatorade dumped into the water). The same shots of sharks lunging in for the kill are repeated throughout the movie, too.

But the biggest problem is that everyone spends most of the film completely unaware of the shark swarm, despite the near dozen scenes of sharks yanking people into the water and eating them. (The sharks usually performed this by biting onto a rope that the victim was holding and dragging him or her in...there are a LOT of ropes in this movie.) These random shark attack scenes are hilarious, and completely without context. Shark Swarm is largely about six or seven characters, but since they can't get eaten by sharks or even know about the sharks too soon, most of the kill scenes act as fifteen-second transitions. Like, you're watching a lunch scene with Daryl Hannah and The Dukes of Hazzard guy, and then they cut to a scene where a shark eats a nameless skin diver, and then they cut to Daryl and The Dukes of Hazzard guy eating dinner. There's a lot of that.

If I hadn't already drawn the conclusion that Shark Swarm was an experiment in making a shark attack movie where the sharks are of almost no consequence, my theory would be that Shark Swarm was produced as the world's first intentional drinking game movie. One swig if the random victim manages a line or two before getting eaten, two swigs if not. Three if the scene involves a shark eating someone whose face is never shown. It's a good thing I watched Shark Swarm with my nephew, otherwise I'd be in the hospital today.

Despite this, there's stuff to like in the film. I enjoyed seeing all of these vaguely familiar faces who clearly understood that they had shit roles in a shit movie, desperately trying to rise above it and somehow succeeding. This isn't one of those TV movies that makes you feel bad for stars who were once much bigger stars, but rather, it's one of those films where you know the people in it cakewalked their way through production, had fun and wrote the whole ordeal off as a paid vacation. It's not that they seem bored or "iffy" about their roles, it's that they acted with a nice lightheartedness that surely fit a film featuring twelve scenes where sharks yank people into the water to eat them...not to mention the fact that they were working from a script that called for a grandmother and a local, non-denominational pastor to fall in love. (There's twelve scenes for the sharky yanks...thirteen for Granny and God.)

I'm a little torn on Shark Swarm. I know I can't recommend that you buy the DVD, because this is a film that was so firmly built as a lazy TV movie that you'd feel awfully stupid paying for it. A rental, maybe, but I still think it was meant to be watched on regular TV with only half of your interest vested.

On the other hand, there's enough stupid shit in here to satisfy the bad movie lover in anyone. There's shark ray guns that make sharks forget that they're hungry and swim away. There's a climactic scene where the heroes must interrupt a baptism ceremony at sea before the sharks can eat everyone, even though the guests were standing in water that was only up to their ankles. There's a scene where one of the lesser heroes gets shot STRAIGHT IN THE CHEST, but manages to have a two-minute, calm goodbye conversation with The Dukes of Hazzard guy before finally dying.

If they trimmed Shark Swarm down to 90 minutes, it could be my favorite movie ever.

Special bonus Murphy's Law thingamajig:

I bought Shark Swarm and Lake Placid 2 at the same time. Haven't watched the latter film yet, but I just noticed that the aforementioned Dukes of Hazzard guy is the star of both movies. Something about that scares me. Is it coincidence, or have I just never realized that I'm John Schneider's #1 fan?

If anyone needs me, you know where I'll be.

Posted by Matt on 07/23/2008. E-mail me!