Shark Week 2: Times of Terror

By Steve Hutchison

Nothing puts a smile on a shark's face like Shark Week. Getting your leg bitten off is trendier than getting a tattoo, nowadays. It makes a great story to tell and you can even make a movie about it.

When they are not exploring space, growing five additional heads, or traveling by means of tornadoes, sharks are busy getting turned into robots, lava, sand, ice, or ghosts. Sharks are our friends, except when they're hungry, which they usually are. If you show signs of weakness or hostility, you will be attacked. If you bleed, you will be attacked. Shark Week is the time of the year when you do not want to be swimming with sharks.

In this second edition of Shark Week, I review 78 shark movies and rank them from pathetic to great. Watch them in order; they will only get better!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Hutchison
• Release date: Feb 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781778870071

Steve Hutchison

Artist, developer and entrepreneur in film, video games and communications Steve Hutchison co-founded Shade.ca Art and Code in 1999, then Terror.ca and its French equivalent Terreur.ca in 2000. With his background as an artist and integrator, Steve worked on such games as Capcom's Street Fighter, PopCap's Bejeweled, Tetris, Bandai/Namco's Pac-Man and Mattel's Skip-Bo & Phase 10 as a localization manager, 2-D artist and usability expert. Having acquired skills in gamification, he invented a unique horror movie review system that is filterable, searchable and sortable by moods, genres, subgenres and antagonists. Horror movie fans love it, and so do horror authors and filmmakers, as it is a great source of inspiration. In March 2013, Steve launched Tales of Terror, with the same goals in mind but with a much finer technology and a complex engine, something that wasn’t possible initially. He has since published countless horror-themed books.

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Tales of Terror’s

Shark Week 2

INTRODUCTION

Nothing puts a smile on a shark’s face like Shark Week. Getting your leg bitten off is trendier than getting a tattoo, nowadays. It makes a great story to tell and you can even make a movie about it.

When they are not exploring space, growing five additional heads, or traveling by means of tornadoes, sharks are busy getting turned into robots, lava, sand, ice, or ghosts. Sharks are our friends, except when they’re hungry, which they usually are. If you show signs of weakness or hostility, you will be attacked. If you bleed, you will be attacked. Shark Week is the time of the year when you do not want to be swimming with sharks.

In this second edition of Shark Week, I review 78 shark movies and rank them from pathetic to great. Watch them in order; they will only get better!

#78

90210 Shark Attack

2014

A wereshark murders a group of students.

2/8

The intro sequence really wants us to know that this movie is taking place in Beverly Hills. 90210 Shark Attack is written by David DeCoteau and Charlie Meadows, and it is directed by DeCoteau. The man, and this is nothing new, is much more interested in the male body than a substantial plot. Genre stereotypes are inverted, here. That’s a signature that’s earned DeCoteau a cult following.

There are scenes right out of soft-core porn, in this, but the nudity is mild. The whole student/teacher dynamic is kind of weird. Cuddling is forbidden, and, of course, so is sex. This exposition is cute, and all, but where the hell is the shark? Well, the context in which the sharks are injected into this story might throw you off. It’s totally random, and it’s bad storytelling.

The whole time, we’re nowhere near the sea, and sharks are the last thing on our minds. Prepare for the longest homoerotic shower of all times. Shit hits the fan 47 minutes in, and it’s not pretty. It’s fucking stupid. The creators have tricked us to believe this was worthy of the shark week tradition, and they basically shit all over it. Bad film. Bad, bad film.

#77

Jurassic Shark

2012

An oil company unwittingly unleashes a prehistoric shark from its icy prison.

2/8

Jurassic Shark is made the way horror movies are, which isn’t the path that all shark movies take. Shark movies are an easy way for filmmakers with micro budgets to piggy back on a popular trend; Sharknado set the bar pretty high. They might as well be making Dracula films. Sharks aren’t copyrighted. Anyway, let’s face it; this one’s pretty bad. It’s as bad as it gets in this category.

The sound sucks; it’s either echo or noisy, the photography is horrendous, the dialogue sounds fake and the actors, well, they do what they can while everything is falling apart. The shots are badly framed. The camera is shaky. The lighting is pretty much limited to daylight. The characters spoon-feed us what the writers want us to know but can’t figure out how to convey otherwise.

This was shot on a lake because, well, the ocean is expensive and complicated. Sharks don’t do lakes, but a quick line of dialogue takes care of that. Trevor Payer is credited for additional dialogue, so the script must’ve been pretty abysmal before his intervention because dialogue is one of Jurassic Shark’s biggest weaknesses. Jurassic Shark is a disappointment.

#76

Raiders of the Lost Shark

2015

A shark released from a top-secret military lab kills random people.

2/8

The following is a true story, character names have been changed, yaddi-yadda... This story makes no sense. You’ve been warned. Now make room for retarded slapstick comedy. With a 71-minute running time, this film knows what it can and can’t accomplish. The actors are wearing their own clothes and are lit by daylight, which can get depressing when scenes are shot under a gray sky.

Prepare for the coldest and windiest swim in the history of shark movies. We need a girl in bikini and this is the warmest beach you can get during a late Canadian summer. The acting problems, in this, are only surpassed, in terms of mediocrity, by the production design, which is pretty much nonexistent. On the positive side, the movie has two defining assets: pretty girls and a cool title.

In case you wondered; no, Harrison Ford doesn’t show up and nobody’ s wielding a whip. You know what’s better than a French-Canadian actress? A French-Canadian actress getting topless, then eaten by a paper cut-out shark. Most scenes are shot in nature, with natural lighting, so don’t expect much, visually. This film isn’t very good. It’s one of the worst shark movies out there.

#75

Snow Shark: Ancient Snow Beast

2011

A shark that travels in snow