Attention, any and all filmmakers contemplating making a shark movie. Here are some key points to consider. How much money do you have? Is the budget there to create believable shark effects and attack sequences? If not, do you have any directorial tricks up your sleeve to convey suspense without convincing creature work? Or failing all that, do you have a remotely compelling human story to tell? And if by some chance you have the means to hire a big name action star in the lead, can you at least give him something badass to do, like wrestling sharks or some shit?
Someone really should have had the makers of Shark Lake answer these questions prior to them starting work on this misguided, tedious, worthless piece of shit. Unfortunately, if these questions were asked, all parties concerned said, “who cares, let’s make the movie anyway.”
A sleepwalking Dolph takes on the role of Clint Gray, a rough, tough black market dealer of exotic animals who comes a cropper of the law and gets sent down for five years, leaving his infant daughter to be adopted by Sara Malakul Lane’s police officer Meredith Hernandez. (Yeah, I’m wondering if there might be professional regulations against that sort of thing too, but let’s not overthink anything here; it’s quite clear the filmmakers didn’t.) However, what no one knew was that Clint had a certain deadly animal stashed away in a certain body of water, which – drum roll please – was pregnant. So once Clint walks out of jail, it soon turns out there’s something nasty in the water.
It’s a perfectly good B-movie premise. Unfortunately, all these cut-price SyFy Channel type modern monster movies seem to have lost any sense of what constitutes a good B-movie. If it’s badly written, badly directed and badly acted, lacking any real tension – well, fine. It’s still possible to be entertaining. There just needs to be some sense of fun. If all else fails, pile on the three Bs – but oh wait, no, they’re not going to do that as these types of movies are generally intended to go straight to TV, where (despite this being the age of Game of Thrones and so on) such things are apparently still frowned upon. Still, surely they’ll at least go the trouble of making something that actually looks like a movie, right? Decent camerawork, lighting and editing? Some sense of cinematic scope…? Please?
Please believe it gives me no pleasure whatsoever not to be able to recommend a shark movie with Dolph Lundgren in it, but Shark Lake is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with low budget direct to DVD filmmaking today. Shame on everyone involved. Yes, even you Dolph.
Shark Lake is out on VOD and in cinemas in the US on October 2nd.