Six times the head, one-sixth of the fun

Skulking in the shadows of the more headline-grabbing “Sharknado” series, another franchise has been chomping its way through people’s precious time and now finds itself on its fourth instalment and sixth head. “6-Headed Shark Attack” continues the series’ strong theme of having absolutely no connection to the previous movies save for one-upping the headcount and this time our toothy terror is snacking on the eight participants of a survivalist marriage boot camp, run by a man whose own wife has just left him.

That’s about your lot as far as character development goes, although the four married couple contains an unlikely diversity of plot-related professions, including a contract lawyer and a meteorologist who gets lumbered with the dumbest pseudo-science dialogue imaginable. The acting is, as you’d expect, terrible and some of the effects are just as bad – with a fake mist-shrouded shot of the ‘lighthouse’ that wouldn’t look out of place from “The Five Doctors” a particular highlight.

The film doesn’t wait to unveil its ‘star fish’ with an opening that makes a vague attempt to explain the origins of the sextuple selachian before everyone gets munched up. The instant action gives false hope, though, as the rest of the film pads its running time with lots of shark-free scenes of bickering, posturing, arguing and clumsy emoting. Because the story struggles for reasons why the characters would venture into the water, the shark itself gets fed up and decided to toddle onto land, putting its best face forward as it scuttles around the shore.

Whereas previous instalments of this multi-mouth franchise offered moments of knowing self-awareness, “6-Headed Shark Attack” is artlessly, witlessly, lifelessly earnest. At one point, one character abruptly feeds herself to the shark as if she can’t take any more. I know how she feels.