2-HEADED SHARK ATTACK

I've just reviewed two classic films that hold up better than I remember them to be, as I analyzed why they are considered to be such memorable and groundbreaking treasures of cinema, as well as personally reminding myself why I love writing about film so much! But I haven't reviewed a shark movie yet this summer like I always do, so it's time for me to once again dig into Hollywood’s obscure collection of trash by reviewing a crappy shark filmed that was picked by my work-buddy simply titled as...

A large group of college students taking a Semester at Sea on a ship headed by Professor Franklin Babish (Charlie O'Connell) and his wife Anne (Carmen Electra) hit a dead megamouth shark and accidentally send it to the ship's propeller while retrieving it, resulting with the ship's hull being damaged and the boat to slowly sink. Nearby they discover a deserted island where they seek refuge until the ship is fixed, that seems like a perfect place to explore and study since the island is actually an atoll. Once setting foot on the atoll their luck begins to drastically change when they find the grounds to be shaking, later on realizing that the atoll is about to sink into the ocean floor. Their hopes for the ship being repaired for them to leave the atoll before it's completely sunk becomes highly unlikely when the ship's ONLY mechanic gets devoured by a giant two-headed shark who craves to feast on the helpless and naughty students stranded in the shark's territory.

The idea of having a giant great white shark with two heads does sound like a goofy yet amusing concept when being put on paper. This is pretty much the shark in "JAWS" as if he was as big as Moby Dick and had twice as many teeth and brain power, it sounds awesome. But the execution on the other hand is quite boring. All the shark does is swim, and eat double of what an average shark can chew and that's pretty much it. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference in terms of behaviors if it has two brains or not since the creature behaves like any other shark you'd see in these kind of movies; or even so much as having two heads given the shark's unusual size where it would seem more than likely that he can eat just as many victims with one head attached to giant body as he could with two heads which makes the idea very pointless and not all that interesting. As poorly executed as "Ghost Shark" and "Sharknado" were they are at least imaginative and offered more variety than what this film gives us. The "Sharknado" can suck up numerous victims as the sharks inside the tornado would either eat the people inside it, or fall in various locations to devour anybody it encounters; a Ghost Shark can only materialize when water is present leading to many different and bizarre scenarios; a two-headed shark just follows and eats a couple of people at once that aren't as massive when compared to what the other sharks can do, as well as many shark movies that came out before the three films that I've mentioned.  The idea of a two-headed shark is just as creative as Timmy from "The Fairly Oddparents" wishing to be a crab with two heads.

If you've read my previous reviews on modern day shark movies, or seen one for yourself, the CGI for the shark is as bottom of the barrel awful as you would expect it to be, along with the rest of the film's CGI garbage that makes this boring concept even more uninteresting for how obviously digitized it looks to the point where you know that nothing is really there. Some of this animation is so ugly that it oddly enough made the crappy 3-D effects in "JAWS 3" look legitimately grotesque. The only time I ever found it to be amusing for how bad it is, is seeing the characters suddenly turn into video game characters for the Ps3/Xbox 360 as their being eaten for how obvious the graphics look despite how hard the film tries to distant and blur the images of the characters underwater. And what's even worse about the film's computer effects and making the shark look less scary or fun to look at is how inconstant its size is. It'll at times be as big as a boat, other times it will be appear to be average size only slightly bigger than a typical shark, and sometimes it would do the impossible by being able to somehow attack people in waist deep water! Does this shark also have some kind of super power to change size? It makes as much sense as having one or two moments when we see blood oozing out of its mouth when it munches on absolutely nothing.

I will give the film this in terms of effects; it's one of the very few modern shark films I've seen to use some kind of practical effects. In some shots as the shark attacks its victims, will get a few quick shots of a giant shark puppet with the actors interacting with it. That's not to say that they aren't as cheap as the CGI, because it's just as horrendous. The design for the shark looks rubbery and beat-up, and comes off as so lifeless that you get the impression that the actors and the effects team are moving the shark. Its looks so bad that the shark in "JAWS: The Revenge" or the exploding shark in Batman from 1966, look more life-like than this. And given how often the film relies on its CGI, no matter how fast the shots of the puppetry used for the shark are shown, they always stick out like a sore thumb for how incredibly different they are to the effect that the film loves to use and exploit the most!

With the averagely boring bad effects aside, the way the film is shot and edited is just as annoying, pretentious, and sleazy as those elements are in "Psycho Shark". During an attack as we're presented with terrible fast editing and hideous effects, most of the shots that we'd see during these scenes are shots of the ocean being filled with blood. And not as in we're seeing these shots with the shark and its prey; I mean just shots of the water filled with blood before cutting back to seeing the attack where the film does it so much that nearly half-way through the film they don't just get irritating, but the blood effects look more and more like red dye where even the shots that show the actors acting with the blood as they're being attacked gets worse and worse for how bad the acting is, and how overused everything else supporting the scenes are. Thankfully I'm glad that the film doesn't keep cutting to black and cutting back to seeing a bit of the attack as shown in the film's opening scene. That was insufferable and nowhere near as clever as how "Open Water" used that trick (pretty much because that film had an atmosphere and a scenario that gave reason to why the scene kept blacking out as the suspense surrounding it felt more realistic and less gimmicky)! However none of those shots are not as insufferable as the film’s excessive love for jump cuts and dissolves that are clearly not needed for whenever they are used. You pretty much see them in most of the scenes when a good half of the characters are together walking, getting on a life boat, heading towards the atoll, or just simply standing! I swear to god that they're some of the worst uses of these filming techniques that I've ever seen for how long, repetitive, and out of the blue they are! And hey, did I mention that this film also loves to use the shaky cam? How desperate is this film to make the attacks look less fake when it's only making them more obvious for using almost all the annoying editing and filming cliches in the book?! Alright, they do use the shaky cam to help create the effect for the ground shaking, which is understandable for why it's being used, but everything supporting these scenes such as the cheap and clearly added-in sound effects, the crappy CGI, and the actors not looking that frightened by it as they pretend to stumble from the vibration are so horrific that you become more aware of the film's manipulation, giving you the impression that somebody is literally shaking the camera as opposed to the ground actually shaking. As for those of you who wondering if this film rips anything off from "JAWS", it uses very little.  There's the underwater POV shot that looks like watching the opening credits to "JAWS" on fast forward; we get some shots of peoples legs in the water; and there is an explosion at the end that’s done by implausible convenient luck; otherwise that's it. It has as much JAWS references as "Psycho Shark" had, and that film is alternatively called "JAWS in Japan"!

And do you know what else that this film and "Psycho Shark" have in common? This film is nearly as perverted, from its bikini shots, images of women's butts whether it's underwater or them walking, and women being shot and edited in fashion as if they are posing for Playboy magazine or a beer commercial as we'd get music that you'd most likely hear in stripper clubs. The actress who spends most of her time looking sexy is Carmen Electra who is simply the film's eye candy. And for some of you pervs reading this wondering if she reveals anything, she doesn't. In fact there's only one scene in the movie where the characters get naked and show their breasts, and that's when three of them go skinny dipping as the two girls make-out to attract the guy joining them that's then interrupted by the shark implausibly swimming up to them in shallow water, and eating the two girls as we watch them twitch and ooze out blood from their mouths before being tugged underwater (that also appears to look sexy for how badly acted the scene is where the girls seem to be shaking their body and boobs intentionally instead of looking to be in pain, even with the blood present). So if you're expecting this film to be just as sleazy as "Psycho Shark" in hopes to get you through all this crap, you're going to be highly disappointed.

Now I've mentioned that there's very little creativity when it comes to seeing people being axed off, however that doesn't mean that the film doesn't have some laughable moments that stand-out. There's of course the skinny dipping scene that I just mentioned, that's weird, silly, cheesy, and sexy; a scene where two girls are running from the shark on land as the atoll is sinking where they stand on a dock thinking that they've escaped the shark as incredibly sappy music plays with the girls acting unnaturally happy until the shark devours them, that is so clear as bad as this movie is that they're going to die for where they're standing, how little we know these characters, and overly happy the scene is that it's hilarious; and a moment when the shark bites the mechanics leg that somehow doesn't bleed, get torn off, or the victim looking hurt in anyway showing how weak of a villain the shark is, despite being so gigantic, fierce and having more than one head. These scenes are the real highlights of the movie that gave me a legitimate laugh when compared to other shark movies, which is saying something from my viewing experience, even if there's so very few of those moments.

When diving into characters there are at least over 25 of them on this voyage where only a few of them stand-out, as most of them only exist to be shark food with little to no depth or personality being given to them. The characters who leave some kind of impression are the Professor and his hot wife, the muscle flexing "Jersey Shore" reject Cole, Paul the nerd, and Brooke Hogan as Kate who's afraid of the water and sharks, and foolishly hopes that this voyage will help her conquer her fears. Unfortunately there's nothing much to them for how bland, and generic they are. The acting as I established many times in the review is indeed as bad as you can imagine in a film like this to be. You'll have your average overreactions to the shark and the people he kills for how comically phoned in they are, as well as a few nonchalant moments of people screaming and gazing at the terror before them as if it's not that big of the deal. The unnatural expressions to the events happening around them only gets worse when we see them huddle together and talk about how they are going to deal with the situation, that contain so many pauses where their break-downs and how they communicate feels so unnatural that you get the sense that the actors are waiting more for their queues to speak and yet keep missing the moment when they are supposed to deliver their lines for how delayed it is. The worst actor in the movie who I wanted to see get devoured but knew that it wasn't going to happen since very few leads in these shark movies gets killed is Brooke Hogan who comes off as bored and annoyed rather than a woman that's trying to conquer her fears. Her I don't care attitude is almost as emotionless as Tara Reid in "Sharknado" except that it's not as robotic.

OVERALL THOUGHTS

If you’re looking to watch a movie about a shark with two heads with no quality what-so-ever, you'll definitely get it, and in a nutshell that's really what you have to expect in shark movies of these kind. Being a big fan of horror movies who always looks to find some kind of entertainment value in the awful ones, for some reason I just can't get into these kind of shark movies, because there's little worth seeing or coming back too for how unexciting and obnoxious they are, and this movie is no exception. The effects are so generically bad that they aren't interesting to look at; the concept of a two-headed shark is surprisingly boring; the characters are mostly disposable as the ones who stand-out are very dull; there are very few attacks that come across as funny or cool to look at; the acting is bad and is hardly ever laughable; and all the camera tricks that the film tries to use to hide how fake these attacks look, and try to give the film some kind of identity is more annoying that it is helping the film. I can see why people find entertainment value in these crappy shark movies, and I sincerely wish that I could find at least one bad shark movie that can do the same for me (that isn't a JAWS sequel), but until then, this one can be thrown into the ocean along with the other bad shark movies that I reviewed for good old Bruce to eat.