This week, I continued my winless streak of trying to find any good movies in the Amazon Prime Dungeon. I opted for the low level pleasures of a cheesy CGI shark versus bikini girls programmer, Jurassic Shark. How do you screw up a movie about a Megalodon, a 52 foot long, prehistoric eating machine? You know you want to find out…
JURASSIC SHARK (2012)
We open with a long-ass wikipedia article explaining what a megalodon is. Yes, it’s a giant shark, I got it. You kind of nailed it in the title, but I’m sure all of these megalodon facts will come in handy at some point during the film. Ha, I’m totally kidding.
Then there’s two blonde bikini girls having a boring conversation near a two-foot deep lake. This is intercut with some non-actors in lab coats shouting dialogue in a hallway and then in a stairwell, where the sound echoes because they were too cheap to film in a room with decent acoustics.
The bikini girls are stalked by a camera POV shot moving through a murky swimming pool. Then I witnessed the saddest damned shark attack I’ve ever seen, and this includes several Sharknados, Jaws 3-D, Sharktopus, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, Ghost Shark AND Three-headed Shark.
The bikini girls playfully splash each other for what feels like an hour until the actresses pretend to be pulled under the water. No screaming. No rubber shark fin. No frothing water. Not even a goddamn squirt of ketchup. Then the credits roll over a static shot of lake water. Screw you, director Brett Kelly. You are a terrible filmmaker, I hope you sold your groovy live-in van to finance this movie and now you’re homeless.
Now we cut to a group of non-actors getting out of a car. We know they are the bad guys because they are all dressed in black. They are art thieves who stole a priceless painting. Their boat is attacked by the POV camera and they lose the painting to the bottom of the two-foot deep lake. “Something’s got me, grab my hand,” screams the bearded oaf who disappears first. I hesitate to call it a shark attack as there is no on-screen evidence that a shark came anywhere close to him during this scene. If a 52-foot shark actually bit someone, they wouldn’t be thrashing around for minutes. They would be swallowed and digested pretty quickly.
Then three bikini girls and a guy get out of a Nissan. Apparently they are trying to expose the evil oil company’s illegal drilling. Plot dispensed with, now we just wait for these dullards to get eaten in the placid pond.
Somehow, four of the art thieves escaped being eaten. One idiot goes back into the water and is menaced by a teeny stock-footage shark. Remember, this is supposed to be a giant monster shark. A special Oscar should go to the Wannabe Vin Diesel guy in a tank-top who shouts, “Look, there it is! Shark, Jerry, shark.” If you want to get a better appreciation for Vin Diesel’s thespian skills, get a load of this guy. His awesomely flat line readings are the only bad-good part of the movie. Sadly, Jerry is eaten by a fake-ass computer shark and we are treated to the third use of the same shot of the shark swimming past the camera.
Now it’s the bikini girls’ turn to get attacked, and we see the same shot of the shark swimming past for the fourth time but flopped so he’s swimming right to left. Nice special effects by film butcher Brett Kelly. He totally had me fooled that he had a second shot of a shark.
The surviving girls and the art thieves team up to have boring conversations in the woods. For some reason, Fake Vin Diesel knows that the shark is a megalodon, and everyone just takes his word for it. I see what you’re trying to do, movie, but repeatedly calling a tiny stock-footage shark a megalodon isn’t suddenly going to make the garbage shark effects any more impressive.
An already dull movie gets even more boring when the actors take a slow walk through the woods, each step documented in loving detail, their post-dubbed footsteps drowning out the half-mumbled dialogue. There’s even a long, static low-angle shot of everyone’s feet walking past the camera. Simply astonishing.
Finally, just for stupidity’s sake, the surviving two bikini girls decide to help the thieves retrieve the painting and confront cinema’s least convincing terror shark. They try to swim down to get the painting while Fake Vin Diesel chucks Wile E. Coyote-looking dynamite in the direction of where the shark would be, if the fake-ass shark wasn’t in a completely different movie than the actors.
We are treated to a repeated shot of the CGI shark swimming away from a non-explosion. Then in a totally believable, impeccably directed bit of action, the girls take out Wannabe Vin Diesel with a limp-wristed thrown rock and he blows himself up. The remaining henchman is laughably fake shark eaten. Incompetent imbecile Brett Kelly re-uses the same shot of the shark swimming for the SIXTH time, except here he super-imposes it against the sky, totally convincing me that sharks can fly. In a courageous act of cinema vérité, the shark flies through the air, off-camera chomps the villainess, then lands in the same exact spot it leapt from in one Jurassic jump. Brett Kelly suspended the laws of time and space to deliver the awesome coup de grâce (I imagine) on the deserving villain. Bravo.
Then the bikini girls manage to blow up the shark in the least interesting way possible. Hooray, movie thankfully over, right? Oh, you’d be very wrong, kemosabe. In order to stretch this turd-fest out to feature length Destroyer of Happiness and Joy, Brett Kelly adds a coda. Two very Canadian fishermen have a terribly acted conversation. They, of course, are eaten by a shark after a punchline that is not worth repeating. Then shameless crap-hound Brett Kelly has the cojones to proudly slap his name as director of this crap-fest THREE TIMES. As the movie plodded on, refusing to end, my desire to do bodily harm to him only grew in intensity.
BOTTOM LINE:
I read one review calling this “The Citizen Kane of crappy shark movies.” I think a better analogy would be the Plan 9 From Outer Space of crappy shark movies. Even old Ed Wood could’ve done a better job directing this movie than the mentally damaged and very likely micro-penised Brett Kelly. It is remarkably inept in every facet of film-making. Despite being only 78 minutes long, it felt like a year went by while I was watching it. All that being said, it is free with your Amazon Prime account, and where else will you have an opportunity to see “The Worst Movie Ever” according to IMDB? And oh boy, is it terrible.