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Showing posts from July, 2016

Ice Sharks (2016)

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Ice Sharks  (2016) Dir.: Emile Edwin Smith TC4P Rating: 4/9 Species: A theoretically evolved, faster and more aggressive form of the Greenland shark. Something that I have noticed about myself during Sharknado Week is my reticence in watching any of the films that are being aired while my wife Jen is in the room. Jen, being a more highly evolved specimen of purportedly the same species as me, cares not for this silliness. On the first one and a half days of the event, Jen was otherwise occupied with family business outside of the home, and so I made a full marathon day of Sunday, and knocked out a couple of other films early on Monday. But the evening premiere shark films that air at 9:00 p.m. when we are both in the bedroom? Well, I try to knock out a few minutes here and there if she goes off to prepare for bed, brush her teeth, or get something from the kitchen, etc. It's a disjointed way to watch a film, but it does allow me to catch up on notes if I am taking them (it de

Dam Sharks! (2016)

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Dam Sharks! (2016) Dir.: James and John Kondelik TC4P Rating: 3/9 Species: bull sharks, but bull sharks that build dams like beavers. However, unlike beavers, they use human body parts to do so. (Well, except for Zombeavers, but that's a different movie.) In lieu of an actual movie poster (can't find a real one), I offer up this title card... When I first heard the title Dam Sharks!, without looking up any further information on its plotline, I wondered what it could be exactly. I absolutely discounted the notion that sharks would build dams, and figured that it was probably just a bunch of bull sharks that swam upriver and ended up at the head of a dam area. But that sounds rather dull. Then I started to wonder if maybe there was a missing apostrophe at the front of the title, and the Dam was really supposed to be 'Dam , as in Amsterdam. I figured there could be a storyline in that city's canals, which would be preposterous, of course, but hell, they alre

Atomic Shark (2016)

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I am unsure if this poster is for the same movie or an earlier conception of it, since the shark in this film does not have anything strapped to its back. Atomic Shark (2016) Dir.: A.B. Stone TC4P Rating: 4/9 Species: great white shark mutated by atomic radiation; has red hot, glowing dorsal fin that can slice through people and objects (or so it seems); scores of other sharks, seemingly all great whites, appear late in film. A couple of weeks ago, I was in awe of a Philippe Cousteau documentary – Nuclear Sharks – where Cousteau and his crew, including his wife, Ashlan Gorse, visited Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, an area where the United States performed a series of atom bomb tests over a period of a dozen years from 1946 to 1958. Our country, in seeking to further study atomic power, decimated the area, and even distant populations thought to be out of the direct path of the explosions experienced medical difficulties (up to and including death) from the radioactive fa

God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlesharks...

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I have always been a bit cynical towards the notion of "Christmas in July". Everyone complains about how long the winter holiday season has gotten – even the wackos who continually yell about "putting the Christ back in Christmas" – but I have seen even the staunchest of their like get thoroughly disgruntled over being reminded that there are "just 87 shopping days until Christmas" sometime in late September. With the ever-inching advance of seasonal marketing over the past few decades, it is often unbearable. So, why is there this stupid notion of what should be a once a year, winter month thing also being forced upon us by various concerns in the middle of the summer? As far as I can ascertain, the thrust of so much (but not all) of this "Christmas in July" fanfare seems to revolve around and come from fairly secular activities and quarters. If anything, that probably makes all the Fox News alarms about the "war on Christmas" even mor