Sky Sharks is a disappointment I did Nazi coming
Brought to you by four production companies who seemingly put more thought and effort into their studio idents than they did producing a good movie, SKY SHARKS not only promises more than it delivers, what it does put on screen is haphazard, unpleasant and – psychologically speaking – somewhat concerning.
When a team of geologists discover an old World War II Nazi laboratory intact and fully functional, they revive a threat that endangers the entire world. As part of their increasingly desperate attempts to turn the tide of the war, the Nazis created cybernetically enhanced sharks that could fly and carry ordinance and pilots who themselves were genetically mutated undead super-soldiers. As the Nazi menace rises, a reformed Nazi scientist working for the US Government initiates his failsafe programme – a task force code-named the Dead Flesh Four made up of reanimated KIA Vietnam soldiers.
Once again, despite putting them in the movie’s title, SKY SHARKS isn’t a bad shark movie. Not to say it’s a good movie, not by a long shot but in reality, at best, it’s a bad shark-adjacent movie. Yes, there are sharks in it, but they’re not the main thrust of the story – unless you would classify any Western as a horse movie, whether good, bad or ugly. Instead, it’s a vapid, gratuitously graphic and gory zombie movie which, lest your Mountain Dew-frazzled attention wander for even a second, includes copious graphic nudity.
Not to say those ingredients can’t be blended in an entertaining and interesting way, but SKY SHARKS is less a movie than an unpleasant parade of edge lord video game cut scenes strung together by a Red Bull-frazzled basement-dwelling incel onanist.
Superficially there’s some similarity to IRON SKY and DEAD SNOW but where they were underpinned by a sly political satire and a gleefully informed sense of humour that set out to mock the Nazis, there are too many scenes in this movie that feel like the makers were more interested in having plausible deniability for their desire to cavort around in Nazi paraphernalia and fetishise the Third Reich rather than attempt any kind of commentary whatsoever. They play with the potently toxic iconography the way a toddler might play with their careless parents’ loaded handgun.
What humour there is, is crass and cruel, the effects are too obviously digital to delight and amuse. SKY SHARKS is a repulsively clumsy and tone-deaf piece of filmmaking that can’t seem to rise above its obvious origins as a subreddit conversation gone awry.
