Water Park Shark

“Looks like we got ourselves a water park shark. Hey, that rhymes!”

I thought that I knew what I was getting into. This was directed by Anthony C. Ferrante, after all. I know Sharknado. I know the vibe. I know what movies of that particular strain of inspiration are like. I did not expect a good movie.

I was still unprepared.

I did consider choosing a different movie instead. Sharktopus was right there. It’s probably the biggest movie that I haven’t covered yet. But I will save it and its two sequels for next year. Right now, we have a water park. And sharks.

Let’s get this out of the way first: this movie is not worth watching. It was painful. It made absolutely no sense, and trying to force it to make even a little bit of sense made me lose brain cells.

From the trailer, I expected these to be ghost sharks. After all, a prominent shot was a shark literally swimming right through a wall and disappearing! Clearly, the water park was built over a haunted, dried seabed and there’s some kind of curse or something that woke the ghosts up.

But no! Apparently, there’s just a massive tunnel that sharks can swim through! On the side of the lazy river! And no one notices or cares! How is that not a safety hazard? How is that not grated off? How does it exist in the first place?! It’s not like this is at the mouth of the river! It’s literally right in the middle of it! In the middle of the park! Why does it exist?!?!?!?!?

And the water slides! Sharks are inside and riding the water slides! How? That is simply not physically possible! Why are they not ghosts? They should be ghosts if you want to have sharks chasing people down water slides!

They have real water slides too! All of this was shot on location in Cape Cod. That part, at least, looks decent. I was so excited when I saw all of the water slides with the colors and lights and the fun that you can have sliding back and forth trying to avoid a shark. And they waste all of that potential!

We don’t even have normal sharks. Instead, we have sharks that have been driven mad by leaking lithium-ion batteries, which naturally leak fluorescent blue sludge that dissolves bones and muscle and conducts electricity extremely well. And one nice shark called Gums because it has no teeth and acts more like a puppy than anything else.

Oh, and they explode when shocked with a defibrillator. Yeah. Because electricity or something.

The CGI was annoyingly solid. If the rest of the movie was as solid as the CGI for the sharks, I would have been thrilled. It was stronger than most movies I saw this summer.

The plot makes sense only as far as events do follow each other in a logical and sequential order. It’s the bare minimum, but it manages it. Besides the mutated sharks, there’s a cryptocurrency scheme, a former professional football player with an incredibly traumatic leg injury who then became a FBI agent for some reason, a coach that speaks almost exclusively in “Coach Tips,” and a mayor who is far too attached to a certain horse on the Coney Island carousel.

There is far too much focus on the two leads’ love life than on the actual plot. There is also a big investigation that really doesn’t make any sense, and it doesn’t help that the audience already knows everything thanks to the occasional asides to the Bad Guys.

The kills are very few and far between. They feel, ironically enough, toothless. No one important is ever genuinely threatened, and even when one of our characters is attacked, they only get a bloody smear on their thigh instead of anything even remotely resembling a bite.

Again: I knew going in to expect something on the level of Sharknado. But man, this one was just not enjoyable or fun in any way.

I will see you on Labor Day with a documentary to celebrate the unofficial end of summer. (Can you believe it’s already over?)

Random Thoughts

Something was weird with the color correction because multiple people’s hair looked outright green in some scenes.

The park gets all of its water from the ocean because it’s free. Okay. I don’t think that’s how it works, but I also don’t know enough to argue otherwise. It’s just an excuse to have the sharks anyway.

I really don’t think that adding a few (sealed) bottles of gatorade to a massive pool of water is really enough to make it SUPER ULTRA conductive to electricity.

This movie has some of the fakest looking kisses that I have ever seen.

I thought that there would be fun bloopers during the end credits, but instead they just name-dropped David Chokachi a bunch of times in really forced ways so that was far less fun.

There is a mid-credits scene.

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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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