Alien Shark (2022) by Paul Tomborello


Director: Paul Tomborello
Year: 2022
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Sharks

Plot:
Trying to coerce a vacation, an Army Sergeant decides to hang out on a remote island getaway with her friends and hang out together, but when they find that an alien invasion is going to be launched with a special shark placed under their control and must try to save her friends.

Review:

This was a pretty solid if somewhat flawed genre effort. Strangely enough, the majority of this one comes from the setup that manages to bring the group together into their vacation hang-out and general time together. Rather than acting like obnoxious and somewhat unlikable jerks that are hard to believe would be friends to this caliber much less want to hang out together, this one pits them as a genuinely likable group with the way they’re shown to be hanging out on vacation with the different setpieces shown throughout the vacation. On top of this, there’s enough generally chilling work done here with the build-up of the alien species influencing others around them on the island to start their invasion, controlling people to where they’re unresponsive to others, the backstory with the abducted individual trying to put the pieces together to stop them, and the different features around the island which signal something is wrong.

However, beyond that, there’s not much to this one. For what should be a shark attack film, there’s a surprising dearth of such sequences here where it either never provides any payoff on-screen by either cutting away before anything happens or just taking place off-screen so that there’s nothing shown here. This has nothing to show for a series of attacks that are so infrequent anyway that it’s almost possible to forget it’s a shark attack film due to the far more noteworthy setup of the group on vacation rather than dealing with the shark. Since there’s very little urgency between the group about the creature nor explanation for what’s going on or how the mind-control works and who can get possessed, there’s not much in the way of coherence here about what’s going on, and with the low-budget origins do bring this one down.


Overview: *.5/5
A cheesy killer shark film if not all that good of one, there are a lot of issues and drawbacks with this one that manage to keep it down quite high overall with a lot of detrimental factors and not a lot of positives. Those who are ardent fans of this particular style of indie film or the most diehard cheesy film aficionados will be the main target audience for this one while most others out there should outright avoid it.

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