They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could (they couldn’t), they didn’t stop to think if they should (they shouldn’t have)

Another shark movie, another Spielberg pun and it turns out that I didn’t judge “Raiders Of The Lost Shark” harshly enough, because one of its writers should have known better given they directed this errant nonsense some three years earlier. Welcome…to “Jurassic Shark”.

When an oil company unwittingly unleashes a prehistoric shark from its icy prison, the lurking predator improbably maroons a group of art thieves and a handful of young female college students on – would you believe it? – an island in the middle of a lake. The two groups of strangers must put aside their differences and work together to fight off the monster and escape.

“Jurassic Shark” may infer the eponymous creature is a Megaladon (a favoured option for bad shark movies) but the mismatched and over-repeated stock footage is mainly of mismatched Great Whites. The lake setting, drilling and subterranean frozen fish give me pause to wonder if I’m still watching “Raiders Of The Lost Shark” but no, apparently this is a different movie.

You can often judge a shark film on the first appearance of the shark and this one is guilty as hell. Once upon a time this was famously the worst-rated film on IMDB (it now languishes at no. 19), astonishingly this is Brett Kelly’s 22nd directorial credit and yet he still has developed no discernible skill in composing a shot, telling a story or eliciting any kind of performance from his cast.

The acting is laughably abysmal, from the improbably brotastic art thieves to the college students who come across as unlikely to even have managed a high school diploma but it’s in the sheer ineptitude of the writing and production that this film actually manages to drill down further than any subterranean Megaladon storage, hitting rock bottom and punching through on its way towards a molten core of base stupidity.

The reawoken Megaladopopsicle doesn’t seem to like boats in his freshwater lake, but it’s hardly surprising as it must be quite cramped in the obviously shallow water. Not that the film spends a great deal of time in the ‘depths’ preferring to pad its run time with endless montages of characters walking through forests. Even more technically inept than “Raiders Of The Lost Shark” – if such a thing is possible – there are so many goofs it almost becomes entertaining to spot them. If you could bear to watch this more than once, there may even be a drinking game in it. My personal favourite is two of the art thief bros gloating that they have radios while the third goon doesn’t only to follow it up by showing them having a conversation with each other across the island, two of them using their radios and the other one…I guess speaking to himself?

If you do decide to subject yourself to this cinematic atrocity, your reward will be precious little save, perhaps, for a priceless moment that evokes “Free Willy” and a laboriously set up stinger gag that’s not worth waiting through the nearly 12 minutes of credits for.

It’s a rare zero score for this movie, and if Shark Weak continues at this level, I might just throw myself overboard.