Land Shark bites

There are, broadly speaking, two types of bad shark movies. Those that are professionally yet ineptly made and those that are the work of dedicated – if not necessarily talented – amateurs. LAND SHARK is definitely one of the latter.

Written and, apparently, directed by Mark Polonia (despite plentiful evidence to the contrary), this nonsensical sharksploitation is a triple lack of threat, lacking a decent script, game performances or even competent cinematography to save it.

Cheap and cheerless, it purports to tell the story of Lucinda (Sarah French), a scientist working at MALCO Oceanic Research who finds herself in mortal danger after stumbling across a conspiracy between Doctor Lorca (Kathryn Sue Young) and Doctor Foster (Peter Baldo) to create biological weapons by combining shark and human DNA.

Polonia, of course, is no stranger to Shark Weak, having bobbed to the surface of the chum bucket with SHARKENSTEIN a couple of years ago but, if anything, LAND SHARK suggests a declining grip of the cinematic arts rather than benefitting from the experience.

It opens with a bizarrely staged homage to the opening of the greatest shark movie of all time, JAWS. It follows a young woman staggering along a beach and while it was clearly shot during the daytime it’s colour-graded to make it look like night-time, the better to mimic Spielberg’s 1975 masterpiece. The illusion is somewhat spoiled, though, when the would-be bathing beauty decides to lie down and sunbathe. At night. It matters nought, of course, because she’s soon dispatched by the titular monster although we get to see very little apart from the “victim” being drizzled with what appears to be chocolate sauce and then raspberry sauce. It turns out the LAND SHARK is less a remorseless eating machine and more a broken sundae maker that’s run out of soft scoop mix and just squirts out sauces instead.

The effects are so far beyond laughable that you just won’t want to laugh, you’ll just feel bad for the makers and it’s wicked to mock the afflicted. It features some of the worst performances I’ve seen in my years of covering this particularly schlocky genre and the end result is a waste of everyone and everything involved down to the very photons which convey the light from the screen to your eyes. “Fail fast, fail often” might be something of a successful business mantra but LAND SHARK fails quickly and fails comprehensively by every metric you can measure a film by. Shark Weak 4 is off to a hell of a start.