Review: "Shark Warning"

Jimmy Gadd (Dir.), “Shark Warning”, The Asylum, Acme Holding Company, 2024.

After the release of “Jaws”, the summer blockbuster became a thing and film production houses were keen to capitalise on this piece of marketing success. Even the Jaws franchise was quick to jump, getting sequels, 3-D versions and three-quels into cinemas in short order. All this in the face of foreign film companies making obvious rip-offs and look-alikes which glutted cinemas in the years following. The only one who wasn’t making quick-and-dirty shark flicks in the wake of Bruce’s rampage was Steven Spielberg – he was onto his next blockbuster hit, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.

Shark films have come and gone since then but recently there’s been a sharp uptick. Cruising through Tubi TV you can find a slew of the worst zed-grade shark attack movies that you could ever think of: A movie about a vampire shark that Dracula attacked en route to England? Check. A movie about humanoid mutated sharks built by Nazis that live on the dark side of the moon? Check. Phantom sharks summoned by teenagers messing about with a Ouija board? Checkity-check-check-check. Whatever your variant, there’s a movie for you and it comes with a side of fries too. I’ve often theorised that the regular influx of shark films must be due to the relative ease of building them in cyberspace, making animating them less expensive than, say, H.G. Wells’s Martians, or the average werewolf; however, even amongst these bottom-of-the-barrel scraping outings, whenever you think the bar cannot get any lower, it goes there. This rubbish makes “Sharknado” look like Oscar-contending stuff…

But let’s get on with today’s offering. There’s a warning on the tin of this film and it’s in the title.

Many of the films that poured into being after “Jaws” left the cinemas took some pains to try and distance themselves from the source material. While the basic premise remains – shark attacks people; people get eaten until they devise a way to stop getting eaten – at least there was an effort to vary the essential plot points involved. Not so here. What “Shark Warning” offers is geographical inversion rather than any plot innovation. “Jaws” took place on an island, see? This movie takes place on a lake, albeit a lake separated from the ocean by a dam, but still. Amity was land surrounded by water; here we have water surrounded by land – huzzah! Litigation neatly avoided. And they needed it too because the plot is stolen wholesale.

In the nearby sleepy tourist town, an annual fishing competition in the ocean-adjacent lake floods the township with dollars and ensures financial security for the following year. At least that was the case before the dam was foolishly left open to encourage fish in from the sea and a Great White shark slipped in unnoticed. Having devoured a young lad, the place saw a downturn in tourist visitation and now – twenty years later with the return of the young lad’s brother, still tortured by the event – the fishing gala seems doomed because the dam hasn’t been opened in all that time and the fish population is in decline. Now, this doesn’t seem a whole lot like the plot of “Jaws” but it’s necessary backstory for the ‘local-residents-united-in-opposition-to-the-reckless-mayor’ plotline that both “Jaws” and “Jaws 2” hammered away with.

Anyway, the town Mayor arranges for a shady local guy to blow up the dam to allow fish to swarm in on the eve of the fishing party. Yes – that’s the best plan she could come up with. And we’re supposed to just nod our heads and say, “sounds reasonable”.

Anyway, the brother of the young guy who got eaten – let’s call him Allan – comes back to town in order to punch his still-resident uncle – Ron – in the nose for not having thrown himself at the shark way back when. Much manly soul-baring takes place between these two and local bar owner Lisa - she with the magical talent for famous fish sandwiches – banters from the sideline. Somewhere in amongst all the nose-punching, we meet Ron’s best buddy Bobby and Lisa’s no-hoper sister Sienna, along with the Mayor’s brother Will, so we know just who is going to get eaten and who isn’t. I’ll bet most of you know already, too.

There’s a thing that the writers of this screenplay obviously missed at film school: film is a visual medium; you don’t need to tell the audience about anything that they can see with their own eyes. I blame modern blockbuster movies – especially all of the Marvel and DC stuff – for having made us lose sight of this important fact. In fact, go and watch “Jaws”: much of what we take away from that movie is non-verbal in nature. We feel upset and uncomfortable – even scared – by what we’re shown, not by what we’re told. Here, there is a terrible waste of dialogue – people yammer on about things that we get to see subsequently anyway, or which are not in any way remotely important. At one stage, Lisa rocks up with her dead dad’s arsenal of guns, thinking that they might be of use in combatting a shark, and we are treated to wasted minutes of ballistics descriptions and performance issues that might well have been better spent on something – anything – else. People verbally flag what they’re about to do and then go and do it. What? Did the director have an over-abundance of film stock that needed using up? I got very bored listening to the plot rationales and exposition drone on ad nauseam, and I became painfully aware that the distance between scenes filled with shark action were being unnecessarily drawn out.

(Also, guns are crap at shooting things that are underwater. Look it up. Why are we always being told to bring a knife to a gun fight?)

Speaking of shark action. There are some early moments where film stock of sharks underwater is used to build the tension and, while it looks a little cheap, it works a treat (in fact, “Jaws” did some of this too, so there’s precedent). But when an excess of stuff happens off camera (a la “Sharknado”), cheap starts to give way to tawdry. Then come the clunky matte shots and the remote-control sub with the attached shark fin and believability goes right out the window. You’ll notice from the film’s promotional image (above) how it looks as if there’s a girl lying on the ground with a picture of a shark on a poster behind her? That’s how most of the shark action looks here.

The pleasure to be gained from a B-grade film lies usually in seeing how – with a modest amount of cash and material – a decent narrative can still be aired. Here, it feels like the crew is desperately trying to paper over the cracks in ways that simply make them seem more obvious. To highlight the slim budget, everyone here has a single outfit, even though the action takes place across several days. Or at least, they get a single outfit and a swimsuit (with optional tattoos), despite the fact that no-one really goes in the water – on the water, in boats, yes; not in the water. I can only assume this was budgetary, meant to limit expenditure on clothes, hair and make-up, but maybe, given that this film drones on interminably, it was also a decision made to stop us being confused about who was who.

In the end, everyone gets what’s coming for them and the Boy gets the Girl as an added – almost incidental – bonus. The town gets to have its fishing gala and then gets to think about electing a new mayor. You will jerk awake as the credits roll, wonder why your tea has gotten cold, then wonder if there’s any point in rewinding to catch the pertinent details you might have missed, before deciding not to bother. There is a warning on the label of the tin for this film but it’s a warning about the quality on offer, not the content: no sharks were harmed – or, in fact, were even present - during the making of this movie.

One-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.