Sometime last week I decided I needed to get back into binging shark movies, and with Shark Week in the rear view mirror, I thought now was a good enough time to do just that. What draws you into watching a shark movie as a viewer? Is it the over the top gore in movies such as Deep Blue Sea? Is it the suspense like in Jaws? Or is it the campyness in movies like Sharknado (which stopped getting good after the 3rd one but that’s another review for another day).
Shark movies to me, are a guilty pleasure. For whatever reason, I enjoy watching a shark come in and pick off an unsuspecting victim. One such scene is the sinking sub scene in Deep Blue Sea, where Samuel L. Jackson’s character Russell Franklin is giving a passionate speech of how they need to stick together in order to survive before one of the genetically enhanced makos jumps out of the water and rips him in half. It’s a pretty brutal scene if you’re watching it for the first time and it’s probably my pick for best kill in the entire movie. We won’t talk about the sequels though, oh god no….
Another personal favorite of mine is The Meg. It’s campy, it’s got it’s humor, it’s got it’s big ass shark but the one thing it’s sadly lacking is the gore. I get you needed it to have a PG13 rating but shark movies need gore, man. That’s like making a Halloween movie and you never see Michael Myers actually stabbing anyone. Also the scene where the dog jumps off the boat that I guess was for that wedding party…..am I the only one that hoped the shark would have actually eaten that damn dog? If you can have a small child eaten in the first Jaws, SURELY you can have a dog eaten in the Meg.
Another great one is the film Bait, which is about a Great White Shark that gets trapped inside a flooded grocery store after a tsunami strikes. For an Australian movie, I liked this a lot. The shark looked really good, and the acting was pretty good as well, it’s a shame however that we arent getting a sequel to that movie anytime soon.
Films such as Sharknado and Sharktopus are I guess what you could consider to be cult classics, but they are films that I wouldnt watch all the time. Honorable mentions for decent low budget movies as well are Shark Night 3D and The Shallows. Shark Night 3D is high on my list solely because they escaped the tired trope of needing just one species of shark to do it’s damage. I loved the Cookiecutter shark scene in that one, those little fuckers were terrifying. As of this writing though there are a few that are on my list to be seen such as The Black Demon and Meg 2.
Last but not least, we have to get rid of the trope that only Great White Sharks can be used in these movies, give me a big budget killer Tiger Shark movie, or one about a killer Blue. Let’s escape the same old tired formula and go for something different!
