The Shark Film Office

When I began what turned out to be an unexpected 8-month break from working on The Shark Film Office site last October (due to grievous bodily injury), I had already been damaged severely by a shark film which I had, at the time, been planning to review next on the site. The film was called Shark Exorcist , and with all seriousness, that straight-to-video piece of sheer dreck – after three viewings attempting to make sense of the damnable thing – broke my brain. Really, my brain was broken after the first two viewings to the effect that I stared blankly at an empty document on my computer’s screen for about two weeks before I watched it the nearly fatal third time. Then my brainpan cracked to such a degree that I then and now truly blame my hip injury in late October at Disneyland (on the Matterhorn, no less) on the fact that I had forgotten how to operate my body in a normal fashion following three misbegotten viewings of Shark Exorcist . [Of course, I could also blame it on the...

Ozark Sharks   (2016) Dir.: Misty Talley TC4P Rating: 3/9 Species: Bull sharks. Backwoods terror is a mainstay category within the horror genre, and so I find it unsurprising that attacks of the rural variety should start occurring in the shark film subgenre as well. There have already been any number of more sea monster-oriented films taking place out in the country, and snakehead films have been popular in recent years as well. And, of course, gator and croc films have always been in abundance, and those, naturally, come with the requisite amount of stock hillbilly characters ready to whoop it up and have their shotgun-bearing arms bitten off or to suddenly get eaten after they have decided to dynamite the swamp to "git whatever 'tis out there that ate ol' Cooter las' night!" So, when I heard there was a film being premiered during this year's Sharknado Week on the Syfy Channel a couple of weeks ago called Ozark Sharks, I thought that I knew what I wa...

Planet of the Sharks  (2016) Dir.: Mark Atkins TC4P Rating: 4/9 Species: mutated great white with amplified telepathic abilities as Alpha leader of all sharks in the film; various non-mutated species of sharks, specifically hammerheads and bulls can be spotted. The poster immediately to the right of this text speaks heavily of two influences.  The first obvious influence, from even the swiftest sideways glance, is  Jaws , which copies (though in a far more gruesome manner) the original film's image of the gaping maw of a monstrous shark rising up from the deep to swallow humanity whole. From the second influence –  the title of the film itself, Planet of the Sharks –  one can only surmise that someone has finally taken the logical leap in upping the renewed interest in the popular Planet of the Apes franchise, flooded the entire planet, and simply replaced the original concept's primates with sharks. I figured that such a thing might happen at some point a...

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...