PopHorror Let's Get Scared
I have always loved sharks, and as such have been a sucker for shark movies for as long as I can remember. I have seen a ton of killer shark movies in my day, and while some of them are awesome there are also a lot of them that are mighty bad. My wife and I were bored the other night and were trying to find something to watch on TUBI and ran across Bull Shark. I thought that it might be fun, so we gave it a go.
Did we make the right decision? Keep reading to find out…
Synopsis
An alcoholic game warden tries to stop a man-eating bull shark that has gotten into a local lake from eating everyone who go anywhere near the water.
Boy, was this a hard movie to finish. Somehow, we managed to do so, and I feel like we deserve some sort of prize or award for making it all the way through this film to the end. There are a lot of things that just don’t work for it, and even though I am sure the people involved with it put a lot of time, effort, and heart into it the result is just nothing to write home about for several reasons. The main character isn’t very likeable, the acting is subpar at best, and the shark effects leave a lot to be desired. This movie has a lot of problems, and I am going to be shocked if it doesn’t eventually make an appearance on RiffTrax sometime soon.
Written and directed by Brett Bentman (Minnie’s Midnight Massacre, Kreep) and starring a relative cast of unknowns, it appears as though Bentman saw Jaws and decided to incorporate many of the elements from it (I was honestly expecting a grizzled shark hunter named “Squint” to eventually show up but sadly didn’t happen. Borrowing heavily from Jaws and from about every movie about a killer shark ever made, Bull Shark is not the most original movie out there and is loaded with tired cliches that have been seen countless times before in other shark movies. It’s like Bentman tried not to do anything original, so as a result if you’ve seen any movie about a killer shark terrorizing a small community then you have already seen this film.
One of the main problems with the movie is that there aren’t any likable characters, especially the main character. Played by Tommy Hallum (Missing Persons, Meteor: First Impact), our hero is a game warden named Spencer who has his share of problems and just comes off as just not likable whatsoever in general. He is an alcoholic (which we are reminded of almost constantly), has marital problems, is a bad father, and is quite possibly the most incompetent game warden of all time. I don’t know if we were supposed to like him or not, and to be honest I’m not sure if Bentman was certain himself.
In addition to Spencer, we also have a weirdo associate of his that looks like the wrestler X-Pac, an annoying coroner who can’t stop cramming food in her mouth, a corrupt mayor that looks like Kenny Rogers, and Spencer’s secretary that is trying desperately to be Janine from Ghostbusters (and failing miserably the entire time). I just didn’t care if any of these people lived or died, and to be honest I was hoping that all of them would just get gobbled up so I didn’t have to look at them anymore. It’s hard to like a movie if you don’t care about any of the characters, and this movie is the perfect example of that.
The effects also leave a lot to be desired. We hardly ever see the shark (and when we do it looks more like a great white than a bull) and since it is computer generated that’s really not any sort of a loss. We do see it’s fin often, and it is obviously too small to be part of a large bull shark as the fin is less than impressive in size. We also see it’s shadow under the water beneath people many times as well, and it just looks like an image that was added with AI, so it looked anything but magnificent. The death scenes are quite lousy too and you don’t really get to see anything other than people screaming and being pulled under the surface, so I am hard pressed to say that it has any cool fun and gory death scenes. If you are looking for a killer shark movie wie and scary you are going to be utterly disappointed with this movie.
Normally I dig cheesy low budget shark movies, but this film is the definite exception. It isn’t fun, it isn’t original, and the shark is as scary as one of those blow-up toy sharks you get to play with in the swimming pool. Somehow however, this movie actually spawned two sequels, so I guess there is someone out there that enjoys them for some unknown reason. I have a hard time recommending this one as it makes the old Shark Attack movies look amazing in comparison, and even if you are a huge killer shark movie fan you won’t enjoy this one. It’s like Spielberg decided to make Jaws with a budget of about two hundred dollars, half a script, and made sure to make the characters as unlikable as possible.
Skip this one unless you have some beer and some friends over to watch it with so you can make fun of it the whole time.
