House Shark

The shark movies always try to be funny but this one actually succeeds. It probably should have been about 20 minutes shorter though.

I love bad movies, even when they know when they're bad. This movie just doesn't seem to do a whole lot with the "house shark" concept. The character of Abraham was just irritating and completely unfunny. It started out fun but the last half of this movie just goes on forever. Also it's way too long. Dumb movies like this should be 90 mins tops. I don't think I laughed once.

According to Ron Bonk's comedy horror House Shark, herds of sharks used to roam the land in America until they were forced into the sea by hunters, although a few remained. It is one of these last land-dwelling sharks that terrorises homeowner Frank, forcing him out of his house to live in the garden. With the help of house shark expert Zachary (Michael Merchant) and drunken salty sea-dog Abraham (Wes Reid), Frank tries to kill the big fish.

House Shark is, as the title suggests, a dumb movie. No... scratch that. It's a very, very, VERY dumb movie, intentionally so. Unfortunately, Bonk's particular brand of comedy - goofball lunacy with lots of toilet humour - only occasionally hits the mark, with most of the gags floundering like a shark on a Chinese fishing boat. With the film running at nearly two hours long, the silliness gets really tedious, Abraham's drunken drawl proving particularly grating on the nerves.

The special effects range from the barely passable (I quite enjoyed the underwater scene in which things float on clearly visible wires) to the downright terrible (the shark itself looks like it's been made from chicken wire and papier-mâché). The film opens in promisingly trashy fashion with a naked woman pulled down a toilet by the shark, leaving a bloody mess in her wake, but the rest of the film is nudity free, with very little gore.

2.5/10, generously rounded up to 3 for the one line that actually made me laugh: "I don't know how many people died that day. 3....4... maybe none."

I enjoy poorly-done, low-budget, screwball movies for their sheer lunacy and entertainment value, but this one...Never before have I seen anything put on film that was this outlandishly ridiculous. Some jokes are funny, and Mr. Bonk thought he must have been playing a great prank on the audience. From the pitiful acting, to the obsession over certain body parts, and the ludicrous foam "house shark," there were literally no redeeming parts to this "film." I tried to enjoy ANY part of this cinematic treasure and I just couldn't. If you want to punish someone for almost two hours, ask them to watch "House Shark" with you.

I knew going in that this would be a parody of Jaws, but I was not expecting it to be super corny with very annoying acting from all over the place. This film also has a run time that is way too long for a movie of this type and its obsession with buttholes was a bit disturbing. Sadly, I have seen much worse in terms of low budget shark films as usually seen on the SyFy channel, but this one just lays it on too thick to be good. The jokes fall flat a lot of times and is it just me or did the one guy sound like that prospector from the MST3K riffed film The Final Sacrifice and the son look and sound like that annoying kid from the riffed Teenage Strangler?

The story has a husband going on a date which apparently he feels compelled to go on despite not being attracted to the woman. He leaves his son in the charge of a babysitter who is cute and gets naked and gets eaten! The best scene and shark attack in the whole movie and by far the best behind. Well, the father and the son are living in a tent, the father doesn't want to show the house and wants to destroy it, but the realtors he signed up with do. So they send an expert to kill the shark who fails and then a man who knows about the house shark first hand comes as well as an expert as they try to battle the fish in the house.

The humor is of the parody variety, but just is not funny most of the time. I got tired of the guy doing the accent quickly and the fact they were all named after presidents, pointless. The acting is not good for the most part as it just has the feel of guys who think they are funny trying to hard. The shark is a costume and while it doesn't look great, it does look better than the CGI sharks found in most other cheaply made shark movies and the gore is quite good at times too.

So, while the film was pretty bad, it had its entertaining qualities. It may have helped had the film been shortened so that the bad acting did not begin to annoy and if they had stuck with simply doing a shark parody without the other references. Basically, a movie that tries to capitalize on the success of a film that is over 40 years old. It is better than that lawnmower film that was a parody of Jaws released by Troma in the 80's as that one played it deadly serious for some reason. So this movie has that going for it.