Shark Lake

It's not Jaws, but it doesn't need to be! Get over it. For what it is, I liked it.

My quick rating - 3,5/10. Really bad. I do appreciate the CGI swimmers against a underwater backdrop that has to be public domain video at this point. The movie is laughable to that level and the only shimmering glimpse of hope is the story? Did I really just say that? If you take away the stupid supposed horror element of normal sized bull sharks hanging out in a lake you actually have a somewhat interesting idea. The romance involves the dealer that sells exotic animals and something he lets lose in the water happens to have babies and is a shark. OK, dumb there, but when it is revealed for other purpose just seemed like the story warped two together since he did so to get back with his ex. OK, sounds dumb, but I saw a glimmer of hope, didn't say it was great. Either way, avoid this movie but maybe Jerry Duggan has something up his sleeve(if he hangs onto his screenplay writer) for something better.

As a kid from the 80's growing up in Lundgren's prime, I still find the man massive on the screen, especially when he's not doing a movie that evolves other action heroes, which I have not seen him do in a while.

The big man plays a convicted wild life trafficker trying to make contact with his daughter who's being protected by a small town sheriff who took her in after he went to jail. Now it seems only Lundgren can stop a shark infestation happening on the lake they all live on. I make it sound more action packed than it really is.

It's the most original antagonist Lundgren has ever faced. It's too bad the special effects on his antagonist was so crappy or they could have really had something good here.

It tries to be Jaws but nothing can top that. It rips of Piranha 3D, but at least those movies are not trying to be something they are not.

Although Shark Lake did have it's fun moments, like a Steve Irwin type who hunts down fish for the BBC, it's funny for all the wrong reasons.

With that said, It does have a, so bad it's good, quality to it, and is worth watching just to smile at how horrible it is.

When he was in his heyday in the mid to late 1980s, with a Bond and a Rocky smash behind him, it must have seemed to Lundgren that he would wind up in the 'Stallone/Schwarzenegger' bracket with strings of mega smash box office hits and multi million dollar contracts. Sadly for him, it didn't quite pan out that way with a stream of dreadful B movies coming his way instead from studios desperate to get a smash on their hands. If I were him I'd be looking to dish out a Drago style beating to my handlers for landing me a load of crappy roles in films with 'The XXXXX' in the title... A plus for him is that he isn't the worse performer in this pile of doo doo, which must be the dreadful female lead. The film is surprisingly good fun with all the silliness, cheese, and dreadful acting and ludicrous scripting you'd expect. The cinematography is also worth a mention, some of the nature shots are quite stunning. Harmless inoffensive twaddle at best.

You have to appreciate Dolph Lundgren's tenacity to make movies, he churns out robust quantity of them in last year alone. Unfortunately, in Shark Lake he seems like just a famous name slapped into the title and poster, while being almost completely isolated from the main plot. The movie itself is appealingly bad, this is the level of sloppy presentation equal to random death scene in telenovela with silly fake shark fin, which admittedly surprising to see outside cartoon.

It all goes down in a formulaic monster movie plot, if you haven't predicted it already, there's a lake and shark on it. Cue the montage of silly party girls, stupid death scenes, incompetent authority figure, but wait, it has Dolph Lundgren. However, he's more of a subplot, separated from the rest. It's almost like an average action portion glued to a monster movie.

This is pretty disappointing since the best spark the movie has is the simple family drama. No one would form connection to plastic shark, but audience may relate to Dolph Lundgren as the ex-con trying to bond with her estranged little daughter. It is the closest to sincerity on this movie, yet it occurs too little too late.

Concerning the actual threat, it's undeniably horrible. The visual is incredibly bad, using cheap editing, poor animation effect and actual fake shark fin. The corpse of mechanical Jaws rolls on its watery grave. One can even see the drop in quality when transitioning from day to night. It looks so fake that it would've worked as parody, yet the movie insists on the gritty dark look, it's a bit sad really.

Shark Lake is, by no intention of itself, a parody of Jaws. The brief appearance from Dolph Lundgren can't save it and merely serves as timid advertisement.