Shark Zone – Adventures in stock footage

Shark Zone – Adventures in stock footage

By TylerDFC

Danny Wagner: “I hate sharks, they suck.”

Jimmy Wagner: “Yes, they do.”

I like to take notes when I am watching movies so that when I sit down to write about them I won’t be forced to make stuff up off the top of my head. While watching Shark Zone I began to keep track of the number of times the following occurred:

1. A shark roared
2. A person was eaten

Yes folks, the sharks in this flick roar. And they roar A-LAWT. My estimates put the number at somewhere around 50 with about 23 or so kills. So many people die in this flick so rapidly I lost count of that as well. My Kill-O-Romator may be off though because this movie has a nasty habit of showing people being eaten, then perfectly fine in the next scene. This total disregard for continuity is rampant throughout the flick, and quite funny to boot.

The fun begins with a voice over telling us about a Spanish galleon in the 1700’s that was carrying the Crown jewels from Spain to the new world. It got stuck in a storm and sank taking the treasure with it. I should note that the movie is set in San Francisco (but it sure as hell isn’t shot there) so I would say the captain of the doomed vessel was one hell of a long way off course.

Jump forward to 10 years ago and Jimmy Wagner and his adventurer dad are diving with a bunch of morons to the boat to get the treasure. Even though they all are wearing standard scuba gear they can talk and hear each other perfectly. The film makers were so impressed with their ingenuity that they have the balls to show the actor “talking” underwater with a regulator shoved firmly in his mouth.

You gotta admire the audacity.

Once these morons get to the sunken galleon (it has a metal frame by the way) they get attacked by a group of great white sharks that proceed to eat everyone except Jimmy but including dear old dad. Flash forward 10 years and Jimmy works for the city of San Francisco as a “beach protector” and his job appears to be keeping sharks away from the beaches. The movie is a bit vague on this, at times I thought the movie took place somewhere named “Horsehead Island” which in some helpful stock footage looks to be under the Golden Gate Bridge.

Jimmy REALLY hates sharks and is bitter that they killed his plundering father. He is played by one of the worst actors I have ever seen. This man’s name is Dean Cochran

Dean Cochran gets angry unconvincingly, he is sad unconvincingly, he even gets drunk unconvincingly. He is a bad, bad actor even for STV drivel like Shark Zone. Worse, his character is of the “I Told You So I’m Sooooo High and Mighty” variety and every time he was in the water I kept wishing a shark would bite him in the head.

Because of his Ahab like obsession to kill sharks, he has learned a lot about them. So much that he likes to tell colleagues, friends, even total strangers total random facts about sharks at any given moment. This is highly amusing and usually completely wrong. But I hated Jimmy so I enjoyed laughing at him.

Well, sharks attack the beach for absolutely no reason and eat 5 people in the space of about 5 minutes. The mayor is evil (obviously) so he refuses to close the beaches, citing that they will lose business. He then scoffs at Jimmy’s idea that great white sharks are responsible, even though approximately 200 people saw 3 great white sharks attack and eat everyone. Jimmy must go kill the sharks because there is an upcoming festival crucial to the island’s income. Stop me if you have heard this plot thread before. Yes, like the Evil Mayor™ bit they have trotted out the Crucial Yearly Festival™ bit. To be truthful, those two clichés tend to go hand in hand though.

So Jimmy the Wonder Twink enlists the help of 3 hung over fisherman/surfers to kill the sharks. His plan is multi tiered:

1. Put a coffee cup full of blood into the water.
2. Put his friends into shark cages that are magically suspended in the water about 30 feet away from his boat but entirely unconnected.
3. Give them cameras.
4. Encourage them to leave the cages and swim to the boat so that the sharks can better eat them.
5. Repeat step 4.

To be fair to Jimmy, I think he shoots at the sharks with a shot gun and I think he gave his chums (pun entirely intended) spears, but the movie uses stock footage of real sharks with divers in cages and apparently Photo Shopping out the cameras and replacing them with weapons was too much work.

I should note that the movie uses a lot of stock footage for the shark scenes (and the boat scenes, city scenes, a school bus scene, an exploding beast, storms, really basically EVERY scene that doesn’t feature one of the “actors”). It uses the same footage numerous times so if you like nature video of sharks, these scenes aren’t bad. They are entirely separate from the film, but serve as a nice break from all the eye rolling you will be doing during the movie.

Because bad shark movies need to have more going on then just shark on man violence, this one introduces a stupid subplot about a Russian trying to get the location of the sunken boat from Jimmy. The boat appears to be in 20 foot of water, but apparently no one has found it in the last 10 years. Jimmy is a whiny little bitch, and he doesn’t want to tell. So the Russian asks him about 12 more times. Finally getting tired of Jimmy’s crap, he kidnaps Jimmy’s kid Danny and … you can figure it out.

This flick is terrible, even for an STV. The acting is atrocious. The animatronic shark head used for close ups has a large hole in the top of its head that we see every time the shark attacks. Wooden shark fins are used to show the incoming sharks, but the spacing of the beasts is completely wrong so their bodies should be overlapping in the water and look worse then the wooden fin the two punks concoct in Jaws.

Shark Zone is amusing for the first 45 minutes but when the kidnapping plot kicks in it gets pretty bad. Instead of shark carnage the actors attempt to emote and it’s painful to watch. Luckily the sharks show up to eat the bad guys at the end, although not Jimmy which made me sad.

Shark Zone – Adventures in stock footage