Malibu Shark Attack

If I were the Malibu Tourist Board I'd seriously contemplate suing Sci Fi Channel - LA has its problems, but Malibu is portrayed here as a dismal, grey, litter strewn stretch of abandoned coastline with acres of brown - green seaweed. Killer sharks aside, based on this viewing, Malibu is not the place I'd comtemplate taking a holiday.

I won't dwell on the humourless, lunatic storyline, the substandard SFX, or wooden acting; seriously, Peta Wilson (the only competent actor) had a long fall from the days 'La Femme Nikita'...either that or she simply wasn't taking her career seriously anymore...or she needed the paycheck.

I watched Shark Attack once as I was in the mood for an undemanding bad movie; which is the mindset you'll need when you watch this...either that or find Piranha 3D!

This have got to be one of the worst shark movies I have ever seen. It was so full of things that made you want to yank out your hair by the root.

First, let's talk about the acting, actually most of the actors and actresses performed well enough. Of course, don't expect to see any award winning performances, but they weren't as bad as to be expected from a movie of this type.

Then moving on to the sharks. Goblin sharks? Alrighty then, why not? What was up with the snouts and the spikes along the ridge of their backs? And the way that they always had to open and close their mouths like as if communicating somehow? And how come they repeatedly showed the same clip over and over again, just mirroring it from time to time.

What's next? Oh yeah, lets throw a tsunami into the equation, as if crappy CGI sharks weren't enough. This was the worst-looking CGI animated tsunami in movie history. And they said in the movie that it was a massive wall of water standing 100 feet tall, and yet it did no damage to those wooden huts belonging to the beach life guards? Yeah, okay. But it managed to put places 30 feet underwater, but did no damage what so ever to those beach huts. That was just hilarious. Oh, and I also loved the fact that in some scenes you saw the fake wave travel towards land, but when the camera angle changed, the wave had magically vanished from the surface of the water in the background. That was a really amazing touch to the movie, a fake tsunami that was able to defy laws of physics and magically vanish from time to time, this is as good as it gets.

And the constant filler scenes of showing girls in bikinis playing volleyball or frolicking on the beach, or hunky surfer guys in the water, what is up with that? I know this movie is supposed to take place in Malibu, but come on. Those scenes are pointless and serves as nothing but a way to fill out the time and hope to keep whatever audience is left hooked.

I actually managed to pull through the entire movie, because I wanted to see what else was hidden in the drawer of bad effects and cheesy stories. Hand on heart, then this is really a terrible shark movie. If you, like me, like monster movies, then pick something else, this one is just not worth the time or effort.

This 86 minutes of garbage does not even vaguely qualify as a film. An utterly appalling waste of time - the people responsible for this outrage ought to be publicly flogged as a warning to others contemplating similar movie-making, to not even attempt to add yet more dross to this already inundated genre. Shocking.

AWFUL! Just bloody awful. The two previous reviewers must have watched this on crack (either that, or they're both flaks for the network): this is precisely the kind of B-movie that makes SciFi channel and USA Network SO unwatchable 95 percent of the time. Even the sharks were bad. That's on the dopey director, the excruciatingly bad script, the cheesy producers, and the network drones who lard the schedule with mindless babble like this. But face it: nobody watched Baywatch for its generally poor acting or the blindingly stupid scripts, either -- it was eye candy, the TV equivalent of a pulp novel. The only real eye candy here was Peta Wilson (the men were so stupid every time they spoke that they made me wince, which ruined the effect of the beefcake), and I hope Wilson at least made a decent buck off it: this one's clearly not going into her portfolio.

The 'danger in the water' movies historically have a few remarkable gems among them, but it's mostly a history of losers and throwaway flicks like this. The "Jaws" films had a much higher overall caliber, not just of directors, actors and acting, but of everything else that went into them. The rest of the "scary fish" subgenre (yes, I know sharks are really mammals) shown on cable channels like this are only made for USA/SciFi to be filler in between equally fake wrestling -- perfect for a summer schedule that just reeks of old, cheap USA Network (for SciFi, read idiot dungeons-magic-and-talking-dragons flicks and horror-aboard-the-spaceship instead). It's like for 10 or 12 weeks of the year, they're willing to tolerate a decent series or two like BSG, Eureka, the Stargate series, Burn Notice or Royal Pains, then they go the cheap-ass route the rest of the year and expect us not to notice.

This is just the same insult offered by USA/SciFi over and over again. They learned nothing from their experience with Battlestar Galactica, which brought them tons of adult ***and female*** viewers whom they are now insistently driving away. Way to go, bozos.

What I might enjoy more is video of the USA Network/SciFi execs and the 'pro' wrestlers getting eaten by a few real sharks so that we didn't have to watch them **OR** crap like this anymore. It doesn't matter how they spell it, SciFi or SyFy or Schmy-Fi -- it still translates to trash, and if it weren't for the occasional treasure like Eureka and Battlestar Galactica, nobody would bother with this channel EXCEPT 15-year-old boys: they're the only ones dumb enough to fall for this crap. Which is why I've spent my summer watching BSG on DVD and reruns of La Femme Nikita online instead.

MALIBU SHARK ATTACK is the usual Z-grade shark nonsense, except made without the backing of the SyFy Channel or The Asylum this time around. It doesn't make much difference. This is an independent Canadian/Australian addition that still manages to screw up the storyline by including lots of HORRIBLE CGI effect scenes, alongside an idiotic script and some terrible performances.

Plot-wise, this isn't dissimilar to the Aussie film BAIT, with characters finding themselves trapped in a flooded location with sharks after a tsunami, but while BAIT had the money to be partway believable, this is just nonsense. A group of bad actors splash around and scream in about two foot of water, and are occasionally menaced by goblin sharks which look like they belong in a Playstation 1-era video game.

The movie is packed with whiny characters and only a couple of sudden deaths is enough to keep you watching. Otherwise it's a waste of time, a film surpassed by most other entries in this crowded sub-genre of shark attack movies.