Nightmare Shark

“If it can hurt us in our dreams, we should be able to hurt it back.”

Nightmare on Elm Street but with a shark that occasionally takes the form of an insect swarm instead. I don’t know why the alternative form is an insect swarm. It just is.

This movie was actually a ton of fun. It is the best kind of Syfy movie: silly, ridiculous, cheap, and with a creative spark that reminds me of why I keep coming back to Summer Shark Fest for three years now.

Ignore the fact that the CGI is horrible and that we don’t really get to see any good kills on screen and that they really did steal a ton of things from Nightmare on Elm Street. We get to have shark faces push through the ceiling and distort it while sleeping women levitate midair and have their hair flow around them like they really are underwater.

We get a recreation of the very iconic shot of Freddy’s glove emerging from the bathtub but with a shark’s dorsal fin instead. We get some genuinely unsettling moments where everyone is legitimately in danger and it’s impossible to tell who is going to be the one to die. And we get an actually horrifying nightmare. Several of them.

The nightmares also meant that we got some variety in our environments. Yes, there’s still plenty of water, but we also get a desert and a creepy cabin in the middle of the woods. Is it a little silly that there would be a ‘state of the art’ research lab in the bottom of said creepy cabin? Yes. Absolutely. But I’m willing to go with it.

The acting overall is shockingly solid, as is the writing. Yes, the pacing starts to seriously lag at the end as we get a lengthy exposition dump, and no, none of the revelations are particularly shocking and were easily guessed about fifteen minutes into the movie, but the writing itself is solid.

It went into some new directions too. I would have never expected a scene where one character has to choke another and for it to be a truly difficult and traumatizing experience for them. It surprised me, and I love it when movies do that, when they manage to reframe something in a unique way.

Our characters are likable enough too, even if Ava and Gina look very similar and I kept confusing them. There was no one that I hated or thought was obnoxious. I wanted everyone to live. Movies are so much more fun when you actually care about the characters in them.

I didn’t know this beforehand, but Nightmare Shark is also something of a sequel. Kaplan and Gina both come from the movie Atomic Shark, and Jolene and Rob are from Trailer Park Shark. The only references to their movies are a quick shot of some newspaper clippings, but it’s fun to think that all of these shark movies are all happening in the same universe.

It makes more sense for these people to all have horrible nightmares involving sharks when they went through something traumatic like this instead of it just being random. I might have to check those other movies out now. If they’re even half as enjoyable as this one was, then August is going to be a good month.

Random Thoughts

Shoes on the bed are already unacceptable, but to put your shoes right by your pillow? That’s a crime against humanity.

Bobby Campo, who played Kaplan, was also the protagonist in The Final Destination.

Kauhuhu is the name of a Hawaiian shark god. That’s where the movie’s accuracy involving him ends.

This was clearly a Made For TV movie because it comes complete with several fade to black moments where commercials are meant to be slotted in. Tubi did not place commercials during these moments.

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An Honest Fangirl loves video games, horror movies, and superheroes, and occasionally watches far too many shark movies.

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