The horniest shark movie ever made
Bad shark movies have always had a decidedly horny subtext, perhaps from all the bikini-clad bathers who’ve fallen foul of the pernicious piscine predators over the years but 90210 Shark Attack is the first shark movie I’ve ever watched which seems like it might have been intended to be a porn movie before the makers chickened out and went with shark movie as their plan-B.
When a graduate class arrive in Beverly Hills for an extra-credit project, the “teens” waste no time in prioritising anything but their school work. But one of their number is harbouring a secret from their tragic past, a secret that will devour them all.
You can tell immediately that you’re in the hands of master filmmakers as we’re treated to three whole minutes (out of a total of seventy-four) of establishing shots before we get to the title card. It’s a mix of Beverly Hills stock footage and really shitty CGI shark graphics and, judging by some of the shots of Rodeo Drive, we can count this as a Christmas movie if we want to count it as a movie at all.
Eschewing the conventional wisdom that suggests that shots should be lit in different ways and with any kind of specialised equipment, the flat cinematography makes the most of the empty show home it was apparently filmed in. The cast of babes and beefcakes, evidently chosen for their rippling abs rather than their acting chops navigate the blandly ridiculous dialogue with the skill and panache you’d expect from a clumsy porn set-up.
Donna Wilkes (of Jaws 2) slums it as the class’ professor amidst a no-name cast but reaches rock bottom when she’s tasked with ogling one of the young guys taking a really long, bizarrely soap-free shower in an extended sequence which adds nothing to the film apart from padding out a running time that’s already overstuffed by stock footage and shots which go on for an excruciatingly long time, far after the scene itself has ended. Then again, maybe it’s artistically important to watch Pamela (Donna Wilkes) walk from the tiny swimming pool all the way back to the house? Still, I guess something had to fill up the runtime after they decided not to film the planned porno and then recut it with stock footage of sharks and the sex removed.
It might also be the one of the few bad shark movies to feature zero scenes of the cast in or near the sea at any point, as all the kills take place via an appallingly animated shark head spirit which appears on a seemingly arbitrary basis and, most strangely, doesn’t seem to unduly bother those characters who have seen it kill and kill again.
Grossly inept and ineptly gross, 90210 Shark Attack might have actually been less offensive, vulgar and indecent if it had been a cheesy porno. It certainly would have been more entertaining.
