Empire of the Sharks

First of all I must say that I was lured in given the title of the movie, as I am a fan of the creature feature genre. And yes, there is just something fascinating and interesting about sharks in particular. But the title alone for the movie had B-movie screaming all over it, and when the SyFy name appeared, I must admit to a 'oh, one of those types of movies!' thought crossing my mind.

But still, I decided to sit down to watch the movie, because it is sharks after all. And who knows, SyFy have been known to make a great movie every now and then. They are rarely, but they do exist.

As for the acting in the movie, well I was familiar only with John Savage, and he is always fun to watch in movies. It was really hard to take Jonathan Pienaar serious in this movie given his body gestures and way of acting, whether it was called for in the script or it was his style, I have no idea, but it sure was annoying.

"Empire of the Sharks" falls prey to the usual SyFy level of special effects and CGI. So don't get your hopes up. The effects and visuals are there and they function well enough for their purposes, but they are not impressive eye candies to behold. And the fact that the sharks were growling menacingly as they were swimming about was just ridiculous.

There was something in the movie that was taken directly out of "Conan". It was the scene where chained people were working some kind of milling wheel. A subtle homage or just a random coincidence? Who knows...

I suppose that "Empire of the Sharks" can best be classified as "Water World" meets "Jaws".

The storyline in the movie was easy to follow and required no complex thinking from the audience; so it is essentially just to lean back and watch the movie here. However, the concept of an army of sharks controlled by someone wearing a pair of gloves was somewhat difficult to accepts as a serious idea.

For a shark movie then "Empire of the Sharks" was not overly impressive or particularly enjoyable. It is just another movies in an endless line of less than mediocre shark movies that clutter the genre.

This movie tries to combine Mad Max with Jaws and the end product is about what you expect when you see "shark" in a movie title these days. The only thing I liked was the setting, the various boats and mixes of technology made for an interesting setting. Everything else was absolutely awful. The acting was bad, even for a made for TV movie. The writing relied heavily on long over done clichés and tropes and the plot was rather uninteresting. As with all of the latest crop of this kind of film the sound design is overdone and distracting, potentially to make up for the awful writing. It makes the cheesy action scenes even harder to sit through. Overused bargain bin CG adds to the unbearable cringe that describes most of this movie. The main villain is beyond comical, the actor's performance combined with the writing makes his appearances on screen almost comical, but still somewhat painful.

In short, this movie is bad, not "so bad its good" but "Why did I waste 90 minutes of my life on this" bad.

John Savage. He was in Godfather III, Do The Right Thing, The Deer Hunter.

In Empire of the Sharks he plays a warlord in a post apocalyptic water based society who has a mechanism to control man eating sharks.

Along with his cohorts they terrorise other colonies for tributes. However they come across a young woman who also has the ability to control sharks without needing any fancy gloves.

This Asylum production made for SyFy is dismal. It is Waterworld meets Jaws without any campy fun.

The special effects are of a typical low standard. The film is so dull, its running length is stretched because there is not enough story. The acting by most of the cast is bland.

"Empire of the Sharks" its about what you would expect from a Mark Atkins Asylum film. This sequel to "Planet of the Sharks" maintains the spirit many direct to video or TV Asylum movies have had since they started. Its cheaply made, it has some awful acting (most of the acting is bad but it has a few good performances), its absurd and the filmmaking its incompetent but part of me thinks that's intentional.

Mark Atkins got better since "Halloween Night (2006)" which was a delightfully bad "Haloween" rip off, while its is better than that, its still not good in any way, shape or form.

You really need to be in the right mood when you watch an Asylum film, just relax and try to enjoy the movie for all of its flaws, most of the time its not rewarding but maybe you can get a couple of laughs out of it, its hard to find one that actually deserves to be seen and "Empire of the Sharks" certainly isn't.

Right from the start this starts off bad - despite being set in the ocean (sort of Waterworld meets Mad Max) it was obviously filmed on a beach, probably the same set used for the equally atrocious Planet of the Sharks. With the exception of Ashley de Lange, who plays a Carrie-like shark caller, all of the cast, along with the script writer, deserve to be thrown in the ocean & fed to the sharks. The bad acting is painful to watch. Poor CGI. And sharks do not growl!!! Very bad film.