Avalanche Sharks: les dents de la neige

Avalanche Sharks (2014)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

A ski resort is hosting a bikini contest but they've got much bigger issues when sharks begin to come out of the snow and kill people.

I must admit that I love shark movies but the sad fact is that there really haven't been too many of them. Of course JAWS is a masterpiece and there are some other good ones like THE SHALLOWS but sadly small companies have realized that you can use bad CGI to create ugly looking sharks and throw them into any story line. This could be tornado sharks, sand sharks, sharks with three heads and in this case avalanche sharks.

Sadly this here is one of the least entertaining ones because the film spends way too much time with boring and annoying characters instead of focusing on the shark. The human characters are all extremely boring and they are all basically stereotypes that add no entertainment value. Even worse is the fact that at only 82-minutes the film drags from start to finish. I did enjoy the shark attacks and I thought the film would have benefited had there been a lot more.

Avalanche Sharks is not the worst shark movie out there but that in all honesty is saying very little because it is still a big failure on every level. Avalanche Sharks is a cheap-looking movie, granted yes with beautiful scenery(the only halfway-decent asset) but haphazard editing- to overkill effect in the attack scenes and even lousier special effects. Even toy sharks that you can have displayed in the bathroom are scarier than the shark designs here, which look more goofy and ridiculously over-sized than menacing. The sharks have very little personality either, never do they feel a threat all they do is attack without warning, the movie makes an attempt to explain their origins(which already makes it better than some shark movies out there) but it is written very clumsily and doesn't make sense. Despite all this, the they still manage to be much more likable than the human characters, all of whom are tired personality-deprived stereotypes who just frustrate you with their stupid actions and some not adding anything to the story. Every single one of the characters are terribly acted as well. Not that the writing and story are anything to write home about, the dialogue has a lot of repetition and padded filler and reeks of cheese, while the story is predictable, a mish-mash of ideas barely explored and insultingly ridiculous. The attack scenes range from mild fun, real stupidity and drawn-out boredom, most of which falling into the latter two categories, a couple very abrupt and blink-and-you'll miss them too, none of them tense or suspenseful. You can see them coming a mile away as well, and the conclusion is deeply underwhelming and didn't feel like an ending, the sharks are defeated too easily and too much by chance. To be honest though, I was so bored by the overall movie and so frustrated by the characterisation that I couldn't care less about how it ended. Oh and by the way, if you are looking for a bikini contest like promised you are best avoiding Avalanche Sharks, and if you do you are not missing a thing, that is how bad Avalanche Sharks is. 1/10 for the scenery only. Bethany Cox

To be honest, I suffered through watching most of this movie here and there throughout the past year or so whenever it was airing on television. Although there was worldwide shock and awe with Sharknado (which was so cheesy and irrational that it was funny), they should have kept it at that and left it as a classic cheesy movie. But no, instead they start creating a whole bunch of shark movies...so much so, that the original value of Sharknado is now lost.

Avalanche Sharks is obviously a very cheesy film. But of all cheesy films, it is horribly executed. The CGI is terrible, and the story is just a piece of garbage. To be honest, how can you even imagine sharks living in the snow? At least with Sharknado, they were picked up and tossed around in the tornadoes to terrorize people in the city. Here, sharks are swimming in snow...do the writers even have brains?

Anyway, if you're looking for a cheesy movie, this one delivers for the first few minutes. After that, it loses its charm, if there was any in the first place. This Sharknado spin-off is definitely a disaster worse than any avalanche could ever pull off.

Avalanche Sharks is a stupid film, plain and simple. Its characters have no characteristics beyond the surface. We have the corrupt sheriff, the greedy businessman, the tired sheriff, the virgin, the foreign and a whole cavalcade of empty-headed, teenage idiots. And even then the premise is stupider, which is saying something. It's basically Sharknado with the tornado being replaced with a skiing resort. And the worst insult is that they try to force in a half-baked origin story for these sharks. And it doesn't convince or work, at all.

The movie is really nothing more than a gorefest without the budget to pull of the blood carnage convincingly. The actors do their jobs merely to get paid, which means that we don't care what happens to them. The special effects are just sad to look and the story has no impact behind it, especially when the ending solution is so laughably deus ex machina.

Don't see this film. Sometimes films like this have a certain "so bad it's good" quality, but this is just pathetic.

Besides, I was promised a bikini skiing contest. And they never delivered. Unforgivable!

If you are looking for story, plot, excitement, adventure, depth of character then this isn't the movie for you. It's exactly what it says on the tin, tongue in cheek nonsense. Any film that dares to pair the word 'Shark' with a destructive force driven by snow deserves our respect.

There's good old fashioned story-telling and then there's this, suspend your imagination and your cognitive abilities and sit back and enjoy the ride.

Looking forward to the next instalment, 'Shark Eruption' or 'Shark Thunderstorm', the plot lines here are limitless.