Director: Bob Misiorowski
Year: 1999
Country: USA/Israel/South Africa
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Sharks
Plot:
After a series of shark attacks in South Africa, a researcher finds a scientist introduced an outside chemical hormone into the sharks that drives them into a frenzy and tries to find the one responsible before more are attacked.
Review:
Review:
This here wasn't that bad of a film. One of its best aspects is that there are a lot of shark attacks, and that leads to a lot of fun here. These encounters are really interesting when they occur, such as a thrilling encounter out at sea with a boat full of partying residents, while other encounters, such as the one near the shipping wreck or in the bay near the lab, have some more fun. The dives done into the waters are always uneasy, although the night-time ones are a little more so for the inherent virtue of when they occur. Still, the overall best scene in the film is the lengthy cage-diving scene, which is a ten-minute sequence where they try out converters on the sharks, and it all leads to scenes of sharks banging into the cages with them trapped inside, making for a tense and uneasy encounter.
The last big part of this is the great action that occurs and there's a lot of it as much of the time in the last half plays like a traditional Action movie. There are two really fun chases, a multi-car chase through open fields which includes a lot of gunfire, high-speed weaving, crashes, and lots of objects getting blown up and destroyed, as well as a boat chase that is really exciting. There's also the final raid on the villain's hideout, which is even more fun being packed with gunfights, fist-fights, brawling, lots of deaths, and even more destruction that occurs and ends with the fantastic helicopter scene which is really fun.
While all of these make the film what it is, there were a couple of problems to this that hold it down somewhat. The main factor is that the sharks are rarely mentioned in the middle segment of the film and fade into the background during these scenes, focusing more on the false lead of the cancer study that soon turns into an oil scam. During this, the sharks are absent as it's all done on land, leaving it to be relatively dull for lengthy portions while there's no shark action as the film ends up leaving them with little time in their own film.
The other flaw here is the sharks themselves, which are terribly uneven. Though there's no CGI present, the matter of the real shark stock footage that is used for most of the scenes is obvious to pick out and lowers the scene somewhat. They're never able to keep a constant perspective, either changing in size from scene to scene or even species as well. The other part is that the mechanical ones look rather nice but are too stiff, rarely move about, and are used mostly just to make sure that something is there on-screen leading to a wildly inconsistent approach. Otherwise, these are the film's problems.
Overview: ***/5
With a couple of good points and some detrimental flaws to it, this one ends up being rather fun with some problems. Give it a shot if you enjoy action-packed killer shark films, are a fan of the genre, or find these kinds of creature features interesting, otherwise, there are better ones out there.
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