Review______________
I find it rather funny that the former Sci-Fi Channel, who recently changed their name to the too-retarded-for-words SyFy, also changed their slogan to “Imagine Greater”. It’s like they’re admitting that they suck, and that any moron dumb enough to watch their crappy movies can imagine greater. Or maybe they’re hoping that you’re drunk enough while watching said crappy movies that you actually imagine you’re watching something that doesn’t suck. Unfortunately I only had three beers and a whiskey-and-Coke during this thing, so I couldn’t hallucinate that I was watching anything but Peta Wilson and some no-name losers fighting hilariously misrepresented CGI goblin sharks.
Actually, I’ve come to view these Sci-Fi Originals…oops, excuse me all to fuck, I mean SyFy Originals (kill me now) as more episodes of an ongoing anthology series rather than movies. Think about it. They air weekly, the film quality looks more like a TV series than a movie, they use second-string actors and washed up celebrities, they shit them out with the speed and budget of a TV series, and they appear to operate in some form of seasonal format where we get reruns every now and again. Admittedly this does not excuse the fact that they suck like a singularity.
We’re thrown right into the action, as an underwater earthquake, presumably somewhere near Japan, unleashes a swarm of they-really-don’t-get-that-big goblin sharks, one of which eats a great white. The force of the earthquake and the resulting tsunami send them hurtling toward Malibu.
Then we meet our menu. Yancey, the juvenile delinquent, Doug, Barb, Chavez, and Peta Wilson’s character (I literally finished watching this movie fifteen minutes ago and I’ve already forgotten her name, and for some reason IMDB doesn’t give her a credit), are lifeguards. Bryan is Barb’s boyfriend. Karl and George are construction workers (there’s another woman worker, but she gets eaten right away) who are feuding with the lifeguards because they’re blocking the public parking lot for the beach. There’s some love triangle between Peta Wilson’s character, Karl, and Chavez, but that really never comes into play either, until the end, when she makes some weird comment that sort of implies she wants to have a reverse-'Three’s Company' devil’s three-way relationship/living situation.
Anyway, the tsunami brings the sharks to Malibu, and then floods the city, leaving the lifeguards and construction workers trapped together in the unfinished building works, fighting the sharks off with nail guns and cement saws and the like. That’s really all there is to say about the plot. Except that Yancey, who is doing community service for theft, winds up being Doug’s love interest. This makes no sense because Doug is super-straight laced and constantly flinging her shit for being a child throughout the movie, and the second she hurts her leg they fall in love for no good reason. We are told, by the way, that this leg wound is terribly bad, and could be fatal. It’s a surface cut on the outside of her thigh, nowhere near the femoral artery, and is fixed by a few impromptu first-aid-kit stitches and a sandwich bag taped over it. And it wasn’t even caused by a shark. A fucking filing cabinet fell on her.
Eventually they kill all the sharks with power tools and gelignite, and the flood recedes in a matter of hours, and hooray the day is saved. The stupid damn end.
Ugh. Not that you can realistically expect anything but dashed hopes, indigestion, and anger from one of these things. There are two major problems with this movie. One of them is the fact that Peta Wilson, who I remember thinking was hot when I was around 14 and watched 'La Femme Nikita' on USA when my parents first got a satellite dish, now looks like a man. Not quite as bad as Brigitte Neilsen, but if you pulled those lycra lifeguard shorts down, there’d probably be testicles. I think her voice has dropped a couple of octaves as well.
But that’s nothing compared to the sharks. I don’t think anyone involved with the production of this movie actually has ever seen more than one picture of a goblin shark, nor did they bother to learn anything about them aside from their name and where they live. Let’s start with some actual facts about real-life goblin sharks. The first one was discovered by accident, as most deep-sea fish are, by a fisherman’s net in 1897 (meaning most deep-sea fish are discovered by accident as by-catch, not that they were all discovered in the late 1800’s). They live in the waters around Japan, at depths so great that little to no light reaches them. They occasionally make a nuisance of themselves by chewing through deep-water electrical cables. They can grow up to 11 feet long, but usually are smaller than that. Their dorsal fins look a little like flaccid penises, their tails are paddle-shaped, they appear to be pink and blue in color because their skin is translucent and extremely fragile, and their jaws only do that freaky distended monster-face thing when they’re biting something. Otherwise, they’re retracted into the head and that big overhanging horn-like projection makes them look more like a paddle fish than a monster.
Now, according to this movie, goblin sharks are prehistoric relatives of the great white. They hunt by radar, are thought to have been extinct and have never been seen by modern man, and are around 15 to 20 feet long. Despite being deep-sea fish, they have no problem operating in shallow water and direct sunlight. Their jaws are extremely powerful and always distended, and the forehead projection is not a wobbly cartilaginous bauble but a hardened battering ram. Their dorsal fins are identical to that of great whites, and their tails are crescent-shaped rather than paddle-shaped. Oh, and they have not two flaccid-penis-shaped dorsal fins, but a whole row of rigid, recurved spines like fucking goddamn Zigra! I kept waiting for Gamera to show up and play these bitches like a goddamn xylophone! That’s right, the makers of this movie used the villain of one of the most ridiculous Gamera movies in the entire series as their physiological model when rendering their goblin sharks! The mind boggles. No, it doesn’t boggle. There must be a stronger word than boggle to describe the reaction one has to realizing that the makers of the movie one is watching have used a second-tier Daiei kaiju as their blueprint for a realistic goblin shark.
But I can pass all this ridiculousness off as a result of this movie taking place not in our universe, but in the same space-time continuum as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, where chainsaws not only operate in water, but can be used as flesh-shredding weapons that will not, in fact, become gummed up and stall when the chain gets full of wadded-up meat. Furthermore, what the fuck is a chainsaw doing on a construction site?
The Moral of the Story: You will realize, once you have watched this movie, that your life was missing a very important thing - a man saying in a totally serious voice, “There was a shark in the parking lot”. Also, this whole thing may very well have been an elaborate joke, as the director’s name is David Lister. Did you ever play Sim City 3000?
Editor's Note: Intrigued by Ragnarok's review, I sought out a video of an actual Goblin Shark's double-jaw in action. Crazy shit. See for yourself:
