Shark Hunter

Shark Hunter

Review By Matt & Becky Pelishek

The first 10 minutes of the film alternate between home videos of a small family, and a submarine. The wife really loves to eat French bread.

This sequence exists for no other reason than to make us hate our lives for watching it. Cut to the family on a boat. Its about time. Shark attacks boat, but all action is implied, and we don’t get to see anything sweet. Just the after effects of the kid by himself floating in the ocean.

The writers now decide they’ve worked themselves into a corner, the boy is alone in the middle of the ocean in a life ring, so they make the obvious choice: cut ahead 20 years and skip the details.

Then something about a French team repairing a deep sea station. They didn’t even try to make it look like they were underwater. “Naw, just put them in deep sea gear, it’s the power of suggestion.” I’d agree, if the suggestion was that everything under the ocean is dry. But its cool, a giant shark destroys it all anyways.

The grown up kid had designed a submarine. They take it down to find out what happened to the aforementioned station. It’s at this point that the ‘m’ word is muttered. Yup, that long word that make folks blush and that kids learn about from watching cable. Megalodon. Grown up kid thinks this prehistoric beast is behind the disaster. Much needless drama ensues, as to whether he is right or not, but they’ve already clearly shown the audience that he is. More time is wasted. About 30 more minutes of unnecessary boredom.

Finally, after an intense time of nothing happening, the shark shows up. To their credit, as far as B movie sharks are concerned, it looks pretty cool. It wreaks some havoc, and they try to tranquilize it. No good, it breaks the sub. Now they want to kill it. The megalodon is nice enough to take off for a while so the sub team can come up with a plan. Once the plan is in place, the courteous shark returns. The plan? It’s the old ‘use the mini-sub as bait, then shoot a torpedo at the beast.’ Doesn’t work. They are about to try it again, but WAIT, THE TORPEDO TUBE IS BLOCKED! Too late. They fire, and the sub blows itself apart. Once again, our protagonist is alone in the ocean (he was the one in the mini-sub). Luckily, someone called the rescue team, and they are on the way. But not fast enough. In an unexpected turn, the mega-shark goes after the mini-sub, bites down on it, and the hero then blows himself up, killing himself and the shark. Now everybody is dead. Wow, this ends much like a Shakespearean play. Oh, wait, that’s why, there in the credits, I guess this actually WAS one of Shakespeare’s, lesser known works.

All in all, the only real worthy part of this film was the cool looking shark, so about 5 or 6 minutes worth.