The Shark Film Office

Licence to Kill   (1989) Dir.: John Glen TC4P Rating: 6/9 Species: Great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias); blacktip reef shark ( Carcharhinus melanopterus); Sharkey (Frank McRae); manta ray (Timothy Dalton) James Bond specimen: Timothy Dalton Sharks and James Bond. Like chocolate and peanut butter. At least, that's the way it seemed for quite a few years. Thunderball (1965), Live and Let Die (1973), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and For Your Eyes Only (1981) all contain scenes where sharks are used as a menacing element, usually (but not always) kept in tanks by Bond's enemies for reasons of torture or dispatching of victims. In my head, I always lump the truly insane, Connery race-changing epic, You Only Live Twice into this bunch, but always have to remind myself that the deadly creatures in Blofeld's lair are piranhas, not sharks. Same concept; entirely different fish. Hell, Bond even has a nemesis (and eventual ally, briefly) named Jaws, a giant of a m...

Monster from the Ocean Floor   (1954) Dir.: Wyott Ordung TC4P Rating: 4/9 Creatures: shark, octopus, and a monstrous octopus-like thing with a glowing eye. Monsters, nuclear waste, girls in trouble, sharks... some of the essential elements of low-budget "B" movie thrills back in the 1950s. It helps even more if the girl is in a swimsuit and is wet half of the film, and if the monster is a giant octopus of some indeterminate species, and if the giant octopus has a single eye the size of a cargo hatch and the creature glows due to possible exposure to nuclear testing. And, oh yeah, sharks... Roger Corman had all of these elements down already in 1954 in his very first full producing credit,  Monster from the Ocean Floor . The film is clearly influenced by the previous year's big monster hit,  The Creature from the Black Lagoon , and Corman and first-time director Wyott Ordung seem to be taking great pains to try and replicate the thrilling underwater sequences that mad...

Last Saturday night (June 28th), NBC paid tribute to George Carlin, who died the previous weekend, by replaying the pilot episode of Saturday Night Live from October 11, 1975. Carlin, as a sure sign of his stature in the comedic world at that point in time, served as host for the show, and I was there. OK, not there in New York, but I did watch the show when it first aired. I saw the first Saturday Night Live episode in a way that many would consider to be “on the sly". Owing to the fact that I was staying up incredibly late for an 11-year old, some would consider it that, but it really wasn’t that way. My parents, especially my Mom, let me stay up late on Friday and Saturday nights, and these late night vigils were aided by the very layout of our home in Eagle River. The parents upstairs, we three kids in our secluded basement fortress, with me spending some weekend nights in a sleeping bag in the playroom. Technically, I was supposed to shut the tube off at midnight (I begged ...

Hammerhead: Shark Frenzy  (2005) Director: Michael Oblowitz TC4P Rating: 3/9  Appearance: Mutant shark. As described in the film, a great hammerhead crossed with a human being that, incidentally, used to bang Hunter Tylo's character (the human being, not the shark. Don't be a sicko...) I kept hoping a bucket would appear out of nowhere in  Hammerhead: Shark Frenzy . Not to catch the vomit that any discerning viewer would spew without pause upon attempting to watch this execrable exercise in shark terror. And not to catch any of the massive doses of arterial spray that douse the screen frequently within the film’s labored attempt to update  The Most Dangerous Game  by making the hunter a screamingly mad scientist whose weapon of choice is a mutant giant hammerhead shark-human being hybrid.  No, the bucket is not for either of those reasons. The bucket is only for water. I wanted a bucket with water to appear to see if the characters would react to it ...

Below the Sea (1933) Director: Albert S. Rogell TC4P: 5/9 Appearance: Giant Octopus (of a species which doesn't occur naturally where this film takes place). We get so used to modern special effects and buying the b.s. as to their effectiveness in filmmaking – when it really could not be further from the truth in most cases – that we tend to dismiss everything that came before. Modern audiences also like to scoff at what they consider “primitive” techniques. I would argue that those primitive techniques, however moldy they may seem to us, were often far more efficient at helping the director tell his story than many of the slicker, more recent attempts where the effects overtake the story itself. Overriding effects can make the films nothing more than mere spectacle, sapping any true feeling away from the proceedings (crappy studio-driven scripting, where the concern is more on pleasing focus group rather than let a storyteller spin his yarn, can also contribute in a ma...

Goggle-Fishing Bear (1949) Directors: Preston Blair and Michael Lah TC4P Rating: 5/9 Shark appearance: cartoon shark (undefinable species), able to roar and growl, no sense of humor. So, who has it worse? Sharks in the movies -- where they are employed mainly to threaten the lives of the (usually) human characters in the film, or at the very least, imply that said characters are in mortal danger -- or sharks in cartoons? Certainly, the answers is "in the movies," since sharks almost always end up dying onscreen for their sins, and in some films (in the dark, olden days of the industry), really dying for our entertainment. Their menace is perceived as far more real, naturally, and the potential harm to the reputation of sharks in the real world is that much more immense. Cartoon sharks, on the other hand, not being flesh and blood, have a cakewalk. Or is that "cake-swim"? Sure, they show up, flash their pearlies, frighten the protagonist(s) and generally ha...