Carnography

The Meg (2018)

Well, this is a bit of an anti-climax. I was all set to have The Meg as my centrepiece for this whole Shark Week (2: Shark Harder) thing... and then they go and announce that it's going to be a bloodless PG-13 (or 12A in my neck of the woods). Now I'm not saying that a movie needs blood and guts to be any good, far from it - but this is a sharksploitation movie featuring a prehistoric shark. Not to mention that the book it was based on apparently had quite a few gory deaths. It just smacks of attempting to make a movie more family-friendly for the sake of getting a larger audience for a summer b-movie.

Five years after a deep-sea rescue went wrong and cost the lives of his two friends, Jonas Taylor spends his days drinking beer in a run-down bar in Thailand. He is persuaded to return to rescue diving by an old friend, Mac, and Dr Minway Zhang, who need his help after a deep-sea exploration submarine becomes trapped deep in the Marianas Trench. The pilot of the submersible also just so happens to be Taylor's ex-wife, which is what eventually convinces him to attempt the rescue. The operation goes relatively successfully, with only one death, but while they are down there they realise that they are being attacked by a Megalodon - a prehistoric shark measuring around 25 metres long. Once back on the surface, they also realise that the Megalodon has managed to follow them up and is now swimming freely around the sea and devouring everything it comes across. Taylor and the members of the research facility have to come up with a way to stop the Megalodon before it reaches a populated area and turns it into an all-you-can-eat buffet...

The Meg is a b-movie, pure and simple. Of course, all sharksploitation movies are b-movies, even the one that started them all off, Jaws, but The Meg is the biggest one for at least the last 40 years or so. I mean, it contains a dinosaur shark, and thus is wearing its pulpy, b-movie credentials on its sleeve. Not to mention that its (human) star is Jason Statham, one of those actors who will always be playing hard men in gritty gangster movies or postmodern mercenary movies like The Expendables (Other names previously attached to the film included George Clooney and Eli Roth, who at one point wanted to direct and star). So, big star, big shark, big effects... summer b-movie. However, for a movie that has some admittedly spectacular giant shark setpieces, it is also, as I said above, very light on blood. This is a particularly egregious sin when it comes to the film's big "money shot" scene when the Megalodon makes its way to a crowded beach and... Well, I think it's supposed to be feeding on the hapless beachgoers trapped in the water, but the complete lack of blood really makes you question that. It doesn't matter what we've seen the Megalodon chew through before (whales, billionaires et al), the bloodlessness of this scene takes away any and all threat and fear we might have for the human plankton trapped in the water. I do understand that The Meg is a summer blockbuster more than a B-movie sharksploitation film and with that comes a need to be more "family-friendly", but I also think it was a mistake that cost the film dearly.

On the other hand, The Meg remembers where it came from, and honours that granddaddy of all sharksploitation movies, Jaws, during the film - and in some pretty clever ways. I admit I was sitting and watching the film waiting for someone to announce that a bigger boat was needed, but the film was smarter than that. There's a dog called Pippin, and a scene involving a young boy and his mother on the beach that's almost a shot-for-shot reproduction of the scene in Jaws when poor Alex Kintner asks his mother if he can go play in the sea. To find out whether these scenes play out as they did in the 1975 film, you'll have to watch The Meg yourself, but I will say that I appreciated the film not going for the obvious, low-hanging fruit references.

A brief word on Ruby Rose. She plays engineer Jaxx in the film, and while I might have been mistaken I don't think the character is explicitly referred to by a specific gender throughout the film. Taking into account Rose's real-life genderfluidity, I found that to be quite a nice touch (although as I said, I might have missed something somewhere and so this is all in my head). I know she sometimes gets criticised for a perceived lack of acting talent, but I found her to be acceptable enough in The Meg.

The Meg has already been a successful enough summer blockbuster (it recently topped Solo: A Star Wars Story in terms of money made) and for some that might be enough to declare a film both "good" and a success. But I still feel that by neutering it and removing most of the blood and gore, the film was lessened considerably and didn't manage to come close to its true potential. Perhaps we'll get a different version when it's released on DVD/Blu-ray with all the blood added back in, and we'll be able to see then if I'm right. But until then I still feel disappointed by it all.

 

 

47 Metres Down (2017)

We hit bottom a lot earlier than the last Shark Week, after yesterday's offering of Deep Blue Sea 2. So while we're down there, let's continue torturing this metaphor and take a look at 47 Metres Down (yeah, I've got nothing better. Not every opening paragraph can be a work of literary genius or at the very least not reliant on terrible puns and connections).

Sisters Lisa and Kate are on holiday in Mexico. Lisa invited Kate along telling her that her (Lisa's) boyfriend had to work when in reality he had broken with Lisa because she "made the relationship boring". When she finds this out Kate resolves to give her sister an exciting holiday to prove her boyfriend wrong, and eventually talks Lisa into taking part in a cage dive where they would be able to view sharks underwater from the safety of a metal cage. Everything seems to be going well at first, but then the cable holding the cage from the boat snaps and drops the sisters to the sea floor - 47 metres down. Kate is an experienced scuba diver but Lisa is not, and as well as the danger from the circling sharks, they also have to contend with their air supply dropping and no way to just swim to the surface without risking serious injury or death from nitrogen narcosis. Will the sisters be able to survive and reach the surface, or will they succumb to any of the numerous threats at the bottom of the sea?

For a movie that features sharks so prominently in its plot, poster and tagline, 47 Metres Down (originally known as In The Deep before the studio changed it, but a few copies with that title are apparently floating around out there) doesn't feature nearly as much shark action as other sharksploitation movies we've covered. The sharks are there, certainly, and are a very real threat... but they're not the only threat to our protagonists. In that respect, 47 Metres Down reminds me somewhat of The Shallows, which had a somewhat similar premise, only in this case we're deep underwater with limited air and no seagull friend.

There's a very claustrophobic feel to the film or at least the second half of it, once Lisa and Kate are in the cage and trapped on the seabed, and one of the ways this is realised is by having the first half full of open, outside shots in the bright sunshine. That way, when we're down at the bottom with our protagonists in the murky soup of the water and not able to see more than a couple of feet in front of our faces so we can't see if there's a shark swimming up with eyes on the juicy morsels in front of them until we can see the whites of their teeth, the feeling of being trapped down there is so much worse.

47 Metres Down is directed by Johannes Roberts, whose work we've looked at earlier this year with The Strangers: Prey at Night. At first, I wasn't able to see very many similarities between the two films, but then as I thought more about them I realised that there is a similar use of music and song in them both. It's more pronounced in The Strangers: Prey at Night than in this film, but that makes a lot of sense seeing how the musical scenes in the former film were more diegetic than simple mood music. This makes sense, because there weren't too many opportunities for the sisters to turn on a radio and listen to some thematically apt tunes on the seabed - but again that fits, because you want the bottom of the sea to be dark, lonely and silent apart from the occasional bloop, to maintain the isolated atmosphere.

Another way that 47 Metres Down can be compared to The Shallows is in the fact that Lisa and Kate seem to have about the same amount of luck as Blake Lively's character here. Every thing that could possibly go wrong seems to happen to them in the space of about 45 minutes of film. And the way the film repeatedly namedrops the possibility of nitrogen narcosis (remember, it can cause hallucinations) has the unfortunate side-effect of lessening the third act's revelation considerably. The film is effectively telling us that what we're seeing might not be actually happening, and so it leaves the audience unwilling to trust what they're seeing and therefore more cynical and waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Unlike with a lot of films I review, I can't really get all OCD over any factual errors the film makes with regard to scuba diving, as I barely know the first thing about it (aside from the stuff about nitrogen narcosis/the bends. I knew about that). So I can't really comment on the film's success or failure in that area, although from the look of the IMDB page there are several scuba diving experts there so if that's something that matters to you, then go knock yourselves out. But despite the problems I did have with the film, mainly around the way it showed its hand way too early, 47 Metres Down is a pretty good film. It's trying something new in the Sharksploitation subgenre and does pretty well with it, capturing the isolation and fear one would most likely feel if trapped in that situation themselves.

 

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Deep Blue Sea 2 (2018)

Are we really this hard-up for original ideas that we're having to plumb the depths of the sharksploitation subgenre? Deep Blue Sea was an above-average but by-the-numbers 90s horror movie involving super-intelligent sharks, Thomas Jane, LL Cool J and that one Samuel L Jackson scene that everyone's seen. It was also very much a standalone film that did not leave much wriggle room open for a sequel. And yet, 19 years later, here we are with Deep Blue Sea 2.

Dr Misty Calhoun is a marine/shark conservationist who is invited by billionaire Carl Durant to visit his sea-based laboratory to consult on a project he is working on. She is joined in this by newlyweds and neurobiologists Daniel and Leslie Kim. Also on this facility in the middle of the ocean are three shark trainers, including ex-military man Trent Slater, and a computer technician. Once they are all there Durant reveals that he has been working with bull sharks (allegedly the most dangerous shark, according to Misty), genetically altering their brains to make them smarter and then using cells from them to create a nootropic that can make humans smarter as well - which Durant has been using on himself to give himself an edge over the upcoming war with quantum computers and AIs he is certain is coming. Misty has been brought there in the hopes she can diagnose why the main shark in these experiments, Bella, has been acting strangely. It turns out that Bella is pregnant and smart enough to know how to sabotage the underwater facility and understand that Durant will kill her when he doesn't need her any more. She goes into labour and gives birth to a veritable swarm of hungry baby sharks, and then sets about bringing the facility down around her "captors". Misty, Trent and the others have to find a way to get to the surface while also avoiding the sharks, but even then will they be safe from Bella and her brood?

Deep Blue Sea 2 is a sequel "in name only". In other words, it has little to no connection to the previous film aside from the fact that both films have sharks that have been genetically engineered to be super-intelligent. Of course, now that you've read the plot synopsis you're probably also thinking, "Hang on, this is awfully familiar to the plot of the original Deep Blue Sea," and you'd be right. It even has the same character types - a black CEO, a rough-and-ready shark trainer and a female expert who looks very good in a wetsuit. It's set in an underwater facility that starts collapsing when the sharks get their revolution on; the sharks are smarter than your average shark (and the movie even starts with them having escaped their underwater cage); the survivors have to climb their way out, the facility catches fire at least once, and discount SLJ does get eaten by a shark eventually. The only thing missing is a rap artist in a comedy role and his pet bird.

And guess what? Deep Blue Sea 2 isn't even half as good as the movie it's currently wearing the skin of like a cheap suit, and considering the first Deep Blue Sea was a 6/10 at best, that's a pretty damning statement.

Unoriginal plot aside, Deep Blue Sea 2 doesn't want to even try and do anything original, be it with characters, plot points or scares. The very moment the newlywed couple announced that they were newlyweds, I was counting down the minutes till their inevitable deaths. There are several scenes pretty much lifted wholesale from the first film, like survivors climbing up a maintenance shaft while the water rises below them and brings the inevitably of someone dying a death of a thousand baby shark bites. And sharks leap out of the water like they've been training at SeaWorld. Amusingly, even the one time the film probably thought it was being original turns out to have been done by another, better film first, as they give Bella burn injuries on one side of her head, which should remind you of a certain film reviewed only yesterday...

The effects that aren't explosions or fires are mainly CGI as well, aside from one scene where Bella is out of the water for tests, and then she looks like a rubber model. And those CGI effects are pretty cheap-looking as well, with half-munched faces looking wholly unrealistic (and let's not even discuss the bit where someone gets their bottom half eaten by the baby sharks...). Finally, to add insult to injury, the film apparently decided to not even bother with basic shark facts or their own internal continuity. Sharks do not give birth to 20 or so babies in one go, nor do they scream as the sharks here are heard to do (underwater no-one can hear you scream...).  And one thing that particularly bothered me - at the start of the film we're shown that, including Bella, there are five sharks at the facility. Once Bella has her impossible brood, those other four sharks are never mentioned or even thought of again. Did they step out for smokes? Make a break for freedom while Bella was exacting her grudge? We will never know.

This cannot bode well for the rest of Shark Week 2...

 

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Jaws 2 (1978)

From two sets of toothy predators to another... Welcome to Shark Week 2: Shark Harder. In preparation for The Meg coming out later this week, we're having another week of sharksploitation movies, and since we started off the last Shark Week with the granddaddy of them all, Jaws, it's only right that we start the sequel off with Jaws 2.

Three years after the events of the first movie, Martin Brody is still police chief on Amity Island, which is now building a hotel development to keep the tourist money rolling in. Chief Brody might be seen to be a little bit obsessive when it comes to sharks and water safety on the island, but that's understandable, really. Unfortunately for the island, a new great white shark has arrived in the waters around the island, having apparently heard that the eating is good there, and soon scuba divers, waterskiers, a killer whale and hapless teenagers are all on the menu. Chief Brody recognises the dangers and tries to warn the town again, but after an unfortunate incident where he unloads his police revolver into a school of bluefish, the town council fire him, dismissing his evidence of the new shark's existence because (once again) it would be bad for the town's business. if there were shark rumours floating (hah) about. Brody isn't too concerned about this... until he learns that his sons have gone on a sailing day trip with several of the town's other teens, and the shark is heading right for them, Can Brody come out victorious a second time against one of nature's most dangerous predators?

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water... Originally, Universal wanted a sequel to Jaws pretty soon after that film's success. Steven Spielberg, however, refused point-blank to make a sequel, calling them "cheap carny trick[s]" and not even returning the producers' call when they asked him if he wanted to direct Jaws 2. They then got John D Hancock to direct, but when he had some "creative differences" with the producers and the president of Universal, he was fired and replaced with Jeannot Szwarc (whose other film credits include the 1984 Supergirl movie and Santa Claus: The Movie) who managed to stay on until the end. Meanwhile, Roy Scheider, who played Chief Brody in this and the previous film, was also reluctant to return to the role. Eventually, a combination of being paid $400,000 plus a percentage of the film's net profits and a deal with Universal to forgive his failure to complete a contractual obligation to them (he had quit his role in The Deer Hunter despite being under a three-movie contract at the time) led him to return. These and other production issues, as we've seen from other films recently, tend to lead to foreboding on the part of the audience/reviewer, however...

For one thing, how do you follow a movie like Jaws? Despite what later films (*cough*Jaws: The Revenge*cough*) might have wanted us to believe, sharks are rather solitary predators and not known for bearing grudges or avenging their fellow fish. Thankfully, this was the 1970s, and no-one had yet thought of having the shark return from the grave as a zombie shark or making it a pawn of an ancient sea-druid order. So we just got a new shark in the Amity Island area, swimming around and eating people, with no further explanation needed.

Jaws 2 is a lot more like a traditional teen slasher movie than the first movie as well - primarily because of its focus in the second half on the hapless teens trapped and stalked by the shark, but also because of the odd decision to have the shark injured early on in the film. While attacking one woman on a boat, the shark is burned across half of its head by an explosion, and so when we next see it, it's effectively become a great white Freddy Krueger. I'm not entirely sure what the reasoning behind this was - it's not like there were other sharks around and we needed to single out "our" shark for easy reference, and it's a shark - it doesn't need to look any scarier when it's got that many teeth to begin with.

Another proto-slasher moment is the way that Chief Brody (the woodcutter, the adult authority figure) has to come to the rescue of the trapped teens. If Jaws 2 had been made only a few years later, I suspect the teens, or more specifically one or two surviving teens - would have come up with a way to kill the shark themselves (which may or may not have involved Chekov's Underwater Power Cable, as it does in the actual film). The studio's desire for a strictly PG rating, however, meant that the body count was trimmed somewhat, and nowhere is that more noticeable than in the fact that only one teenager ends up shark food, and bloodlessly at that. I wasn't particularly hoping for most of the teens to become chum (okay, maybe I was a bit, because some of them were annoying), but if you're making a shark movie and your entire third act is focused on this group of nearly ten teenagers, you can afford to lose more than one.

Jaws 2 suffers for being a film made not because there was another story to tell, but because people wanted to make more money out of a sequel. It has some nods to the previous film (the wreck of the Orca right at the start was a nice touch), but a lot of the other "callbacks" are pretty much just retreads of the first film's plot. It was still the most successful of all the Jaws sequels though and was even the most successful sequel in film history until Rocky II came out the next year. But it was also a flawed, unnecessary and overall weak follow-up to a movie that didn't need a sequel (and newsflash Hollywood: there are a lot of movies that don't need sequels; stop trying to force them onto everything).

Oh, and the mechanical sharks still didn't work right.

 

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Shark Exorcist (2015)

Well, it's finally here. It's the last day of Shark Week and we're finally at the film that started it all off. To recap: a couple of months ago a friend and I were talking about how bad we thought horror movies could get while idly exploring YouTube. Eventually we came across a film called Shark Exorcist and my friend insisted that I review it, for science if nothing else. I countered that if I was going to review something so potentially bad, then I really needed to review some good shark movies as well to balance it all out and provide comparison, and thus the idea for Shark Week was born.

A Satanic nun (apparently called Sister Linda St.Blair) kills a woman and dumps the body in the water as a sacrifice to Satan himself to give her an "avenger". Satan must have had a lot of things on his to-do list, however, as it's a whole year before he gets back to her and drops a demonic shark with glowing yellow eyes into a lake in the town of Paris Landing to chow down on anyone who steps into the water. A psychic investigator from a reality TV show turns up to investigate the rising body count and connects with a demonic presence in the water. To make matters worse, Ali, a young woman who is the only person to have survived the demon shark's attacks, starts to act strangely; she is now possessed by the Satanic shark spirit as well and is leading even more people to their doom. Finally a priest arrives in the town as well to investigate things and it becomes up to him to exorcise the shark demon(s) and save everyone...

Warning for emetophobes: people vomit in this movie. Not particularly convincingly, mind, but it was still enough to make me sympathy retch (although to be fair I do have a mild case of the flu right now). Nethertheless I felt it's only right to warn people, in case they end up watching this movie themselves - perhaps on a dare, or perhaps a masked intruder has broken into your house and forced you to watch this movie or see your family and pets die.

Shark Exorcist is 67 minutes long (according to my copy at least). Of those 67 minutes, about nine of them are technically classed as "credits", although there's a couple of post-credit scenes that reduce the actual credits down to 2-3 minutes (and admit it; you would have been surprised if there had been enough people working on this film to warrant nine minutes of credits). Still, that means that this film is at most 65 minutes long, which doesn't even class it as a feature film under the Screen Actors Guild at all, and yet there are still long sequences where nothing happens at all. The worst offender for this was a scene at the very end: a young woman arrives at the beach, strips down to her bikini and lies down to sunbathe, whereupon a man who had been badly stalking her from behind a tree wanders over and proceeds to take several "creep shots" of her as she "sleeps", debating whether or not to give her a quick grope while he's there. (At this point I feel I should mention that Shark Exorcist's director Donald Farmer also directed, among other films, Savage Vengeance, also known as I Spit on Your Grave 2.) And this scene adds nothing to the plot. Nothing.

The production values for Shark Exorcist are also pretty much non-existent (although IMDB says they had a budget of $300,000). My first clue for this was when I saw the trailers that came before the main feature  - both Asylum films and both looking much better than Shark Exorcist. When your movie can be compared unfavourably to Three-Headed Shark Attack, then you should probably take that as a clue that your film is not good. My second clue came when I realised that all of the cast's phones were of the same type - the same type of phone that I use. And I know my phone is pretty cheap. The movie's gore effects are non-existent; they don't seem to have any microphones on set other than the ones attached to the camera... Really, do I need to go on?

I don't think there's a single aspect of Shark Exorcist that isn't terrible. Lines are flubbed or delivered badly ("We're going to need a bigger cross!" said by one actress apparently on the verge of hysterical laughter), and I'm pretty sure that one of the crew was banned from being within 100 meters of children because there are two obviously adult women playing allegedly young girls during the course of the film. And perhaps the greatest sin of all for a sharksploitation film - the demonic shark is barely in the film at all, and even then they mostly just recycle the same bad CGI shot each time.

Satan should sue for defamation of character.

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Shark Lake (2015)

I had some real problems coming up with today's film for Shark Week. I knew I was starting the week with Jaws, and finishing with the film that started this whole thing off, so that just left the films in the middle. Most of them were was enough to decide on, but the final film just kept eluding me. I was almost ready to go for the low-hanging fruit of a Sharknado movie when, during a trip to my local brick-and-mortar entertainment store I spotted a movie. Or to be more exact I spotted the tagline of a movie, which read simply in large text, "Dolph Vs Shark," and at that point I knew I had found my missing shark movie.

Welcome to Shark Lake.

The town of Lake Tahoe (or possibly Alpine Lake; the movie seems a little confused about this point), Nevada is a quiet town, where the biggest thing to happen in recent years seems to have been the arrest of Clint Grey for smuggling dangerous exotic animals. Five years later and Clint is released from prison, and the cop who arrested him, Meredith Hernandez, is afraid that he's going to come for his daughter Carly, whom she had adopted after his arrest. She and the town are about to have a bigger problem, however - something in the lake is stalking and devouring people in the water. It turns out that, just before he was arrested, Clint released a pregnant bull shark into the lake, and now she and her pups are enjoying the rich pickings of their hunting ground. Now both Clint and Meredith are setting out to hunt the sharks before the body count rises any further...

Despite getting top billing, tag line billing and a prominent place on all the posters and box art, Dolph Lundgren is not the primary protagonist of Shark Lake. In fact, I think that Clint Grey (possible alternative names for him probably included Brick Hardmeat and Trunk Slamchest) only appears in about a third of the film total, and doesn't even meet up with the film's actual protagonist, cop Meredith Hernandez, until the climax of the film. This ends up making the film feel like two films that have been awkwardly stapled together - three if you count the Lifetime Movie of the Week subplot of Hernandez trying to abuse her position as a Sheriff's deputy to stop Clint from seeing his daughter. Really, Clint and Hernandez's separate hunts for the sharks are so far removed from each other that you have to wonder why they bothered to have two separate plots to begin with.

Shark Lake clearly took a lot of notes for its plot from a couple of viewings of Jaws. Several of the shark victims are very similar to the victims in Jaws (such as a couple who break off from a beach party/rave to go for a midnight swim and come to a sticky end); an oceanographer turns up (pretty much out of nowhere) and teams up with the cop to hunt the sharks; and a bounty is put on the sharks to encourage every fisherman with more guts than brains to go out hunting as well. Just about the only point missing is the town mayor trying to cover everything up for the sake of tourism. There's also a slimy and utterly odious British TV personality who turns up for a short while wanting to film his hunting of the shark(s) for his show, and if I had thought that I had hated some of the cast of Shark Night and wanted them to die, then I had clearly underestimated the depths of my hate for incidental, "comic relief" characters.

It's clear to me that Shark Lake was really trying hard to be a decent somewhere-between-B-and-Z-movie at least - I was particularly impressed by the fact that they went to the effort to research a shark that could actually live in a freshwater lake - but I think things like the budget let them down in the end. The CGI was... not good, to put it mildly, particularly the blood and gore effects, and some of the shark effects weren't much better. The fact that they had two plots that could have easily been merged together or even made into their own separate movies, but instead were kept apart until the very end, didn't help matters much either. And finally, I can't help but think that any film featuring Dolph Lundgren so prominently should have had more explosions, fist fights and the like. Hell, I wouldn't even have complained (much) if the there had been a scene where Clint Grey beat a shark to death with his fists. But let's be honest here - I wasn't expecting a masterpiece here and neither should anyone else. It's a silly, slightly goofy B-movie that takes itself too seriously sometimes, and as long as you go into it remembering that then you won't be too disappointed.

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The Shallows (2016)

I might have been a bit hasty yesterday when I said that we were reaching the bottom of the barrel in terms of the quality of the films for the remainder of Shark Week. I'd forgotten that today's film was the recently-released The Shallows, a film that seemingly seeks to emulate the isolation and stalking terror we saw in the second half of Jaws. So I guess there was a little bit of quality left after all.

Nancy is a medical student who has taken some time off from her studies after the death of her mother from cancer. To honour her she has taken a trip to Mexico to visit a secret beach that her mother once visited when she was Nancy's age to surf. Everything about the beach seems perfect - the sands, the water, the waves - and Nancy soon loses herself in the moment. However, a humpback whale carcass nearby has brought with it a great white shark, and when Nancy inadvertently gets too close to its feeding grounds it attacks her. Injured, Nancy is forced to retreat to a small rock island that will disappear at high tide, unable to get back to the beach because of the shark's patrolling, and with no-one around to call for help to. It then becomes a battle for survival; woman versus shark...

For the second half of Jaws, when Brody, Quint and Hooper are off hunting the shark in Quint's boat, director Steven Spielberg worked very hard to make sure there were no shots of land visible in any of the shots, because he wanted to emphasize just how isolated the three characters were out on the open sea. The Shallows clearly wants to have that same sense of isolation, but it goes about it in a different way. For both Nancy and the audience, the beach - and safety - is clearly visible throughout the film and is in fact only 200 yards away, but with the shark in the way it might as well be miles away - and at least Brody, Quint and Hooper had each other for company and to talk to. All Nancy has for the bulk of the film is a seagull named Steven (who, I was pleased to see, got his own credit in the cast credits at the end). The isolation and bleakness of the situation is very real, albeit presented in a different way.

Black Lively plays Nancy, and a special mention has to go out to her as she pretty much single-handedly carries the film for the vast majority of its running time. When the film begins she's quite clearly at a crossroads in her life; her mother's death has caused her to question what she wants to do with her life, including whether or not she is going to continue at medical school and become a doctor. Once it becomes her against the shark, however, her existential crisis becomes much simpler - survive or die. Of course, it helps that she's a med student so she can treat her own leg wound to improve her chances of survival after the shark takes a chunk out of it, but we'll forgive that small plot contrivance.

On the other hand, poor Nancy appears to be one of the unluckiest people alive. Not only does she have the great white shark to contend with, but during the course of the film she also has to deal with fire coral, a bloom of jellyfish that she has to swim through (and having been stung down one leg by a jellyfish myself once, at that point I would have just given up and let the shark have me, if I'm honest), the threat of a thunderstorm and the fact that nearly everyone who could possibly help her ends up getting eaten by the shark - and that's not even the full list of bad luck she suffers (some moments have been omitted due to spoilers). At one point I think Nancy was as much - if not more - at risk from dying of gangrene and/or tetanus than she was from the shark.

There were a couple of points in The Shallows that I didn't like - credibility was stretched a bit thin in one or two places, such as Nancy's ridiculously bad streak of luck. I also felt that her climactic final fight with the shark felt as though it would have been more at home in a more action-driven movie than this was. There's also a Blair Witch Project-style confessional moment that I didn't really appreciate at all, and finally I felt that the film's epilogue was wholly unneeded - it just gave us answers to things that weren't really necessary after everything else we had just witnessed, at least in my opinion. Other than these small flaws, however, I found The Shallows to be a very engaging film that succeeds well in bringing a character-driven horror-thriller to the screen, as well as successfully utilizing the bleak isolation that Jaws also gave us.

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Shark Night (2011)

We're now arriving at that point in Shark Week where the good films are getting a little thin on the ground, and we're mostly left with the films that would be right at home on the SyFy Channel or alongside, say, Sharknado (please note that I resisted the urge to use any of the Sharknado movies for this, because it felt like they were just too obvious). As if to emphasize this today's film, Shark Night, was given a 3D version for extra clickbaitability (although because I prefer a life without migraines and eye strain I'm watching the 2D version).

Seven college students of varying stereotypes and degrees of obnoxiousness (ranging from "just a bit" to "counting the minutes until they die") and a dog head out for a weekend of fun at an isolated lakehouse on the Louisiana Bayou. Unfortunately for them, several sharks of various types have found their way into the lake and it's soon feeding time for them. This rapidly-dwindling number of friends have to find a way to survive and escape the lake, the sharks, and the sinister intentions of the people behind the sharks being in the lake in the first place...

Shark Night (3D) is a PG-13 horror film. Now, you might be thinking that doesn't have to be a bad thing - after all, Jaws was only a PG and it terrified audiences worldwide. To which I will counter that Jaws was not only the film that started "sharksploitation" off and got to set all the rules, but it got its PG rating because it was clever with what it did and didn't show (and also because the PG-13 rating didn't come into being until 1984). Shark Night, on the other hand, was made very specifically for a teen audience, and thus was shot and edited with a PG-13 rating in mind to maximise the potential audience share it could get. there's much more evidence on the pretty main characters/future shark food then there is on the sharks or their kills - except for one particular case which I'll get to in a moment. Even the main antagonist, supposedly "horribly scarred" from a boat propeller accident, is still quite ridiculously pretty. Shark Night is also very much a movie for the new MTV generation (and not mine, as I'm of the generation that can - only just - remember when we didn't even have an MTV), something made all the more obvious by things like a lake house montage set to hip music and played partially in fast-forward.

There are two scenes that particularly stood out to me in Shark Night, albeit for very different and not exactly positive reasons. The first was a scene in which the "jock" character, having already lost an arm to one shark, arms himself with a spear he made himself to go hunting for revenge, because apparently that's how they do it where he comes from. This might sound darkly humourous... except that this character is black, and so suddenly the whole scene takes on some slightly awkward racial implications. The other standout scene is even more problematic. One of the female characters, who would be labelled the "slut" in typecast Hollywood horror movie casting, is forced by the antagonists to strip to her underwear and then thrown to sharks who messily eat her alive, all while the antagonists make comments about how hot she looks. This is the film's only real gore scene, and it strikes me as both exploitative and maybe a bit misogynistic, especially with the comments made by the antagonists throughout.

Beyond those two scenes though, there really isn't very much else notable about Shark Night. There are a couple of moments where you can tell where the 3D would have been if I had been watching that version of the film - mainly sharks leaping out of the water at the screen. Harvey Bullock also turns up as a local sheriff so friendly with the teens that you just know he's going to be either affably useless and end up dead, or part of the whole scheme somehow. But overall the movie is just so boringly generic that it goes way beyond dull and into just plain bad. Which is a shame, as it turned out to be director David R Ellis' last film before his death in 2013. Some of Ellis' previous films included The Final Destination and Snakes on a Plane (and he actually wanted to continue with the naming convention here, suggesting Untitled 3D Shark Thriller as an alternate title) so we know that he wasn't one to normally shy away from showing gore, which means I have to assume that the film's anaemic presence was down to studio interference. A shame, because even just the wide variation of sharks used in this movie shows that someone cared about this film being more than just a vehicle to part teens with their money.

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Bait (2012)

I think that one reason why (in my opinion at least) Jaws is still scarier than Deep Blue Sea is because the average audience member can identify much easier with the situation portrayed in the former movie than they can with the latter. People are much more likely to be scared by something they themselves can see themselves experiencing - the everyday situation gone wrong. Which is why I think the basic premise of Bait has the potential to get some of that scariness back.

Twelve months after losing his best friend (who was also his fiancee's brother) to a shark attack, former lifeguard Josh is working in an underground supermarket (as in it's built underground, not that it's a black market or anything like that). He thinks his day is going bad when his ex-fiancee walks into the supermarket with a new man in tow... and then a pair of armed robbers turn up and try to rob the store. And then a tsunami hits, flooding the store and all but a few people there. And then the survivors discover that a couple of great white sharks have been washed into the flooded supermarket with them... and they're on the hunt.

A piece of advice I once read about children's fiction pointed out that a child will be more scared and distressed about a story about a child who loses their parents in a busy railway station than they would be about a story about a pirate getting boiled in oil, because they can relate to the first story a lot easier. While I think that this idea rather underestimates the imagination of the average child, I also think it's relatively accurate in the idea that everyday situations gone badly wrong are more scary for people than others - or, if not scarier, then at least a good deal more tense. I found Bait, for the most part, to be a pretty tense film - claustrophobic and pretty tightly shot and paced to make the best use of the limited space, and the sharks we used well as an ever-present threat on top of the tsunami and all the threats that brought with it.

Bait also doesn't shy away from showing gore. While Jaws worked well with only a few brief flashes of blood and severed limbs for most of the film, and Deep Blue Sea gave us mainly CGI gore, Bait shows us lots of mangled and half-eaten corpses bobbing in the water, along with strings of flesh dangling from fresh stumps. It's another thing that adds to the horror of the situation, seeing these things float around you as you're trapped with them. There were also some moments of black humour - or at least I found them humourous - such as our hero Josh facing down a shark in the movie's climax with a pump-action shotgun - only for the gun to jam because it was waterlogged.

Where Bait does fall down, however, is with its characters. Once again we have the problem that most of the characters feel like they've been taken straight from the Big Book of Character Cliches. As well as our main character (hero with a grudge to settle against the sharks) and his ex, there's a gruff cop and his shoplifter daughter; a reluctant criminal (played by none other than Julian McMahon, which meant that I was very nearly making jokes about Doctor Doom taking care of the sharks throughout); and a couple of obnoxious rich kids and their Pomeranian who I assume were meant to be the comic relief, but the only relief I had was from waiting - hoping - for one or both of them to be eaten (but not the dog. I liked the dog.).It was also very obvious whenever a character was going to die - the moment anyone volunteered to go off on their own or a plan involved one person to be separated from the rest of the survivors, you knew it was time to say your goodbyes to them there and then. Which was a shame for the one guy who performed a heroic sacrifice to save everyone else, especially after they'd gone to so much trouble to keep him alive as well.

In the end though, Bait is a fun movie. It's energetic, tightly paced, has (mostly) engaging characters and manages to balance the danger of the sharks with the danger the tsunami has brought without having the latter overshadow the former.

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Deep Blue Sea (1999)

I saw Deep Blue Sea at the cinema when it first came out, but it dawned on me recently as I was preparing for this review that I couldn't actually remember much more than the basics of the plot - something that's quite unusual for me as I usually have quite impressive recall of all the useless details of the various B- and Z-grade movies i watch. This isn't due to the film being particularly bad or unmemorable or anything like that, but because apparently most of my memories of the film had been overwritten by a clear recollection of that one scene from the movie that everyone knows. You know the one: the one where Samuel L Jackson's character makes that big inspiring speech about how they all have to work together if they're going to survive, and then... well, you know what happens next. The only other thing I remembered clearly was that LL Cool J was also in the film, and that I hadn't been too impressed with him.

Dr Susan McAlester is trying to find a cure for Alzheimer's Disease. A noble aim, certainly, but in her zeal to find a cure she has gone down a dangerous path. Theorizing that a protein found in the brains of sharks could hold to the key to reversing the neural degeneration seen in dementia patients, she genetically engineers three Mako sharks to have larger brains - thus increasing their intelligence and overall size into the bargain. When the man funding the doctor's experiments visits their off-shore facility at the same time as a hurricane passes by, the sharks pick that time to put an escape plan into action - eating any humans they happen across along the way. Dr McAlester and the other survivors have to not only escape the facility before it collapses completely, but avoid and stop the sharks as well...

Near the beginning of Deep Blue Sea, there's a tiger shark with a Louisiana license plate stuck in its teeth - a little nod to Jaws and its tiger shark that had also paid a visit to that state. But other than that reference and the fact that both movies contain sharks, these two movies actually have little in common. In my Jaws review I mentioned how the film showed us that nature was pretty damn deadly and terrifying on its own and didn't need any outside or artificial help in that area. Deep Blue Sea, however, goes in the opposite direction and has the sharks enhanced through the power of Science! to be considerably larger, smarter and meaner than the average shark. So these sharks apparently hold grudges, seem to have some impeccable comic timing (as Samuel L Jackson's character discovers), and are even able to do things that are otherwise impossible for sharks, like swim backwards (and at least the first two things can be explained by their larger brains). And even after all of that, the sharks aren't made all that much scarier.

Part of the reason for that is that the sharks aren't the only threat to the humans - they've also got to contend with their off-shore laboratory collapsing around them. Super-intelligent sharks may indeed be quite terrifying if you have the time to stop and think about them, but when they have to share the threat with an exploding off-shore facility it almost feels like they're taking a backseat to the danger of a collapsing infrastructure. The sharks only really pop up whenever it's time for the survivors to be whittled down some more; to me at least, the rest of the film felt rather like a cut-down version of The Poseidon Adventure.

With that in mind, therefore, Deep Blue Sea's biggest problem is that it's very formulaic. It's got all the key points of your generic action-disaster movie (which isn't all that surprising when you realise that director Renny Harlin - who we've seen on this blog before with the movies A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: the Dream Master and Devil's Pass - also directed Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger) and many of the character tropes found in your average horror film. You've got the female doctor whose hubris comes back to bite everyone (literally) in the ass; the ex-con hero who you just know will be the one to save the day (played by Thomas Jane, who went on to play the Punisher in at least one movie, which just makes it even more certain that he's going to survive); the twitchy engineer; the blonde woman in a relationship with someone who dies early on; and LL Cool J as the comic relief. Apparently, the role LL Cool J plays was originally meant to go to Samuel L Jackson, but his management didn't like the idea of him playing a chef, and so he had a new role written for him. The irony is that the chef character, despite being comic relief (he's a chef, he's a Christian who talks regularly to God, and he has a foul-mouthed parrot) turns out to be the film's other big hero, while the new character is now mainly known in YouTube lists of "Top 10 Surprising Deaths in Movies".

Deep Blue Sea isn't a bad film, but it's not brilliant either. In trying to be both a sci-fi horror movie and a disaster-action movie it ends up spreading itself too thin, and the latter themes come across much stronger than the former. Which means if you're watching the film for the sharks, you're going to end up being disappointed.

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