Director: Donald Farmer
Year: 2015
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Sharks
Plot:
After a series of strange attacks, a woman grows concerned her friends are affected by a strange source and soon discover that a curse has unleashed a possessed killer shark on the community controlled by one of her friends and heads out with a local priest to save her possessed friend and stop the killer shark.
Review:
There wasn’t a whole lot really wrong with this one. One of the better features here is the sheer lunacy continued within this one as all the various plotlines throughout here all come together. Mixing together the supernatural with the nun’s sacrifice and the paranormal investigators’ psychic connections to the creature as well as the body-hopping possession that affects the numerous victims that are gradually put under the sharks’ evil presence, the film gets plenty of mileage out of this supernatural inclusion. That these are placed alongside the concept of a creature feature involving a shark running free in a small-town lake has some interesting aspects to it.
Likewise, there’s also the fact that this one generates some enjoyable attacks on several fronts. The supernatural attacks by the possessed victims relying on the temptation aspect of the sultry performer at the heart of the scenes turn nicely into creature feature when the shark arrives and takes them out in traditional manners. Seeing the shark swim up from underneath and chomp on the clueless victim in several fine attacks around the lake has a fun, cheesy charm that has some worthwhile suspense to things. That these attacks are mostly accomplished with decent enough CGI to not make for an embarrassing shark, it’s enough to end up holding this up for its positives over the detrimental negatives.
The biggest problem to be had here is the fact that hardly anything here makes sense. The randomness of throwing all sorts of utterly bizarre sequences here, from watching a faux paranormal investigator being involved into the scenes of the possessed friend going around town picking up various townspeople as a potential sacrifice only none of them are actually sacrificed to a stupefying scene of a random coven of witch wannabes trying to contact the spirit of someone who died at the lake. None of this is explained or even given a reason for being here, much like the sequence at the fair that goes nowhere or the endless hosts of people in bikinis that pad out the running time, much like the three after-credits scenes do when it could’ve tried to bridge together it’s interesting plot points.
The other issue is the sheer incompetence displayed throughout the film that really does this a disservice. The audio/visual problems here is the main point, making for such a cheap-looking atmosphere here to have the natural sound in the scene that either never matches what’s happening on-screen or being so obviously overdubbed in a different setup that really manages to make this look and sound absolutely awful. The exorcism scene suffers from this the most, turning what could’ve been a cheesy sequence into such a cheap-jack look here with the barely two-minute sequence that ends up becoming a joke of a scene that it just drops the big significantly. As well with the lack of nudity and gore in a scenario that requires plenty of it, these stand out as the biggest problems to hold this one back overall.
Overview: */5
While it’s certainly watchable on several fronts, the technical aspects of this one are far more detrimental and overwhelming as a whole which is what really lowers the film for the most part. Give it a shot if you’re a die-hard completist of killer shark movies or curious about its reputation, while those that are absolutely turned off by the big flaws here should avoid this one altogether.
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