We’re back!

The film choices are limited to Prime and Tubi, because I’ve cut back on streaming services, but rest assured, there’s still a lot of rubbish to come. Yes, I’m returning to shark movies, because there are still around 17,000 I haven’t watched yet.

Empire of the Sharks (2017) – Tubi

SyFy and The Asylum, two things that go together like toothpaste and orange juice, or assault and battery. Here they combine to bring us the spiritual successor to Waterworld we never knew we dreaded. In a dystopian, flooded future, humanity ekes out a damp existence on floating towns beset by warlords and theatrical ne’er-do-wells. Warlord Ian Fein (John Savage) has taken a bunch of ladies from one such town to use as labor, and then as food for his collection of remote-controlled sharks.

Unbeknownst to him, one of the prisoners has the power to control sharks, but she lacks the confidence to do so. Her dull boyfriend goes on the offensive to get her back, going through with one botched plan after another, until he recruits a motely gaggle of seafaring ragamuffins to help send the warlord to the seabed.

Throughout the whole affair, numerous CG sharks pluck chum-fodder off gangplanks in a flurry of sea foam and CG blood splashes.

It’s a fairly standard slice of steamed schlock, made rather tedious by several performances limper than a kelp doily, and sets the bar pretty low, but judging by some of the titles I have lined up, not low enough.

4/10

Something in the Water (2024) – Prime

Getting some of the more sensible films out of the way before launching into the dafter stuff, here we have a decent effort from a mostly female production team, led by director Hayley Easton Street.

The film starts with a brutal attack on gay couple Kayla and Meg (appropriate name). Meg is left for dead, and the film picks up a year later when the two are reunited for a mutual friend’s paradise island wedding. Meg still has PTSD from the attack, and Kayla still feels (rightfully) guilty for Meg’s injuries. Their friends, no-nonsense Ruth, the bride, Lizzie, and Cam, Lizzie’s future sister-in-law, hope that the island will rekindle their romance, and just when it seems the ice might be thawing, everything goes belly up.

On an impromptu boating trip to a deserted island, Ruth is attacked by a shark in shallow water, and is bleeding out fast. It’s up to the remaining friends to get her back to safety, but an encounter with rocks on the way back leaves them without a boat, treading water in the middle of the ocean. Oh, and their bleeding friend is attracting unwanted guests.

The film is an interesting exercise in lower-budget filmmaking, with a barely seen shark (not an issue) and tiny cast, and it walks a thin line between deadly serious and darkly humorous, but for the most part I enjoyed it. The cast are all great, the cinematography is excellent, and the pacing, albeit slow, helps to ramp up the dread.

Bonus points for getting an S-Club Seven song into a scene.

7/10

Bull Shark (2022) – Tubi

A shark in a body of water it shouldn’t be in. A mayor trying to cover it all up. A dog. Shooting a canister to blow up a big fish.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

Spencer Timms is an alcoholic game warden (this doesn’t mean he watches over alcoholic animals), who is supposed to be drying out to save his marriage, but keeps filling his coffee flask with vodka. When a woman’s body turns up with a massive bite mark in it (following a decidedly poor decision to dump a dead-ish, pregnant bull shark into a small Texan community lake), it’s Spencer’s job to take it down, all while being hindered by the local sheriff, the mayor, and Smirnoff.

This has all the trappings of a low-budget flick; dodgy extras, minimal tripod use, and hilarious pick-up shots (one scene involving the ranger meeting a shark specialist obviously couldn’t have both actors there, so I presume one of the caterers was wearing the ranger’s shirt for two-shots). That said, Thom Hallum as Spencer made a convincing lead, he gave it his all and created a morally interesting character. Just a shame the rest of the film wasn’t up to snuff.

There are two more of these films, and yes, I will be watching them. Let’s hope we actually get to see a shark eat someone next time.

4/10

Dark Tide (2012) – YouTube

Frank Capra once wrote: “There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.”

This brings us to Dark Tide, a Halle Berry starrer during the quiet period between her Oscar and relative obscurity.

Berry stars as Kate Mathieson, a free-diver and alleged ‘shark whisperer,’ who along with her filmmaker husband, Jeff (Oliver Martinez), enjoys swimming with great whites off the South African coast, and playfully booping them on the snout. It’s all fun and games until her buddy gets eaten, traumatizing her.

A year later her marriage is on the rocks, she hasn’t been back in the water, and is now running an unsuccessful whale-watching tour. To thwart the bank’s intentions to take her boat, Kate reluctantly agrees to host a trip for her ex and an obnoxiously rich business dick played by Ralph (Camberwell Carrot) Brown, who wants to swim with great whites. Cue much wringing of hands, tantrums, and underwater shots of ocean denizens just going about their business. Lots of underwater shots.

It’s all real footage of the sharks, which is quite effective, except for where you can see where the footage was obviously cribbed from a different time and place, and it’s filmed with an air of realism; indeed some scenes felt improvised as the cast reacted to sharks next to the boat.

Ultimately though, it’s bloody boring. The only attacks are filmed at night and impossible to see, and it takes a whole 120 (!) minutes to get to the action. No wonder it bombed, despite every poster for it placing Halle’s knockers front and centre.

5/10

Graveyard Shark (2024) – Tubi

We finally plunge headlong into the shark titles I know you’ve been waiting for.

However, the first three on my watch list (Jurassic Shark: Aquapocalypse, Mummy Shark, and Doll Shark), were all directed by Mark Polonia — and I’ve been burned by his output before. That’s not to say I won’t turn to them in desperation, but I’m trying to swim around them for now.

Which brings us to this one directed by Matthew A. Peters.

A hammerheaded, ‘roided up monster is eating people foolish enough to pop into the Willsbro Point cemetery for a bit of slap and tickle, and it’s up to a pair of washed up cryptid sleuths, Mouldy and Sully if you will, to try to put a stop to it. No stone is left unturned in an effort to bring as much lurid bad taste as possible to your eyes, and this one features, among other things: three different forms of cryptid sex, ice cream-obsessed stoners, various degrees of blooded knockers, and the worst use of macaroni salad I have ever seen.

You know it’s going to be bad, and this is a good time to introduce my new sub-segment — ‘Just How Bad Is It?’

When you watch a film like this, you know what you are going to get, so the only yardsticks I can use to measure the degree of terribleness are the directing, the story, the acting, and the effects.

The direction is as straightforward as any other micro-budget cheesefest, but it’s not all shaky cam, and there are a couple of inspired shots, so there’s a plus. The story is absurdly bonkers, but some thought went into it, so there’s another point. The acting is fairly awful across the board, but I did enjoy the relationship between the two researchers, and the salad-abusing fisherman, was perfectly fine. Finally, the effects were all practical blood and guts, and featured a funky, plasticky monster suit, which, again, didn’t offend mine eyes.

So there we have it. Rubbish? Yes. A cut above the usual rubbish? Yes.

4/10

Previous Murky Movie surveys from Neil Baker include:

Tech Tok
The Weyland-Yutaniverse
Foreign Bodies
Mummy Issues
Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
Monster Mayhem
It’s All Rather Hit-or-Mythos
You Can’t Handle the Tooth
Tubi Dive
What Possessed You?

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See all of Neil Baker’s Black Gate film reviews here. Neil spends his days watching dodgy movies, most of them terrible, in the hope that you might be inspired to watch them too. He is often asked why he doesn’t watch ‘proper’ films, and he honestly doesn’t have a good answer. He is an author, illustrator, teacher, and sculptor of turtle exhibits.