"The awfulness is one thing; the plagiarism is something else."
Imagine a shark the size of a shopping mall. Now Imagine that shark eating people. Now imagine a movie that ruins such a brilliant concept.Pardon my vulgarity, but there's a line of dialogue in Shark Attack 3: Megalodon that goes:
"How about I take you home and eat your pussy?"
No humor, no trace of irony, just a male character saying it to a female one as if asking for a lunch date.
I sat there stunned. Sure I'd hallucinated such a howlingly inept line of dialogue, I scanned back on my remote.
He said it again! I laughed out of sheer incredulity.
That was the only positive reaction I got out of b]Shark Attack 3: Megalodon.
Now, I love movies about giant sharks. Granted, there haven't been all that many - but I DID once read a very cool novel entitled MEG written by fellow Philadelphian Steve Alten. MEG is about a giant prehistoric megalodon that gets woken up and begins devouring people by the massive mouthful. A solid little page-turner; a very fun read.
You can bet that the low-rent shlocksters at Nu Image Studios read Alten's book too. They even stole the damn title! But while the 'source material' has memorable characters, logical scientific mumbo-jumbo, intense moments of gory action, and an overall vibe of escapist fun - Shark Attack 3 is simply inept in every way.
Case in point: that dialogue I mentioned above. If that's not enough of a red flag, realize that most of this movie is BLAH BLAH YAKKITY YAK garbage. The shark attacks are few and far between, and most of them consist of the exact same stock footage of a shark leaping skyward. Through the magic of MS Paint and a well-trained monkey, that leaping shark now looks a little bigger while the food it's eating (people, boats, other people's novels) looks just a tiny bit smaller.
Be sure you're not drinking anything during the big buffet finale. When this giant shark leaps up and swallows a raft full of keening humanoid appetizers, I challenge you not to laugh in outright amazement. (The sort of amazement that comes when you see something really stupid very suddenly.) Needless to say this movie is packed to the rafters with that awful and mundane sort of bad acting and special effects that would have seemed special MAYBE in 1948.
Hopefully this low-grade import won't ruin Alten's chances of seeing his entertaining novel translated to the silver screen. Lord knows we could use a great "Giant Prehistoric Shark" flick. We already have the worst one.Sure, this one may be "so bad it's good" but there's something about the flick's outright plagiarism that prevents me from offering it even a backhanded compliment.
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