After the surprising success of Sharknado has SyFy channel finally gone too far? Is there such as thing as going “too far” for this network? Are you ready for the heart warming revenge tale about a Shark who comes back from the dead to right the wrong done to him? Never thought I’d ever write that line, but there you have it. SyFy Channel’s Sharknado follow-up Ghost Shark is sure to make people’s heads explode. Is this a good or bad thing? Read on, if you dare!
How can you go wrong with a movie that has a line like “If I want any lip from you I’ll pull down your panties?” A fisherman and his daughter go after a Shark who ate their prize $30,000 catch. Swearing revenge, they hunt the Shark down and torture it to death. The worst part? The Shark was pregnant so we now have a whole family of Ghost Sharks to contend with.
One of the early victims kicks her would be rescuer off his jet ski and takes off – so she wasn’t the most sympathetic person. The Sharks are focused on going after the fisherman’s daughter, Ava Reid (7th Heaven’s Mackenzie Rosman) and her two friends – Blaise Parker (Dave Randolph-Mayhem Davis) and Cameron Stahl (Jaren Mitchell) who happens to be the town Mayor’s son.
The reason Sharknado worked so well was it had a, relatively, coherent (I know it’s an oxymoron, but work with me) story – I could actually believe a tornado would suck up some sharks and drop them on people. Here, the story makes very little sense on the one hand the sharks seem to be completely focused on the Ava and her sister in the beginning, then it starts to attack everyone. Then there’s some sort of town ghost story thrown in and some ridiculous backstory for the creepy Lighthouse guy (Richard Moll).
You don’t watch a movie called Ghost Shark expecting a coherent plot, however, I do want it to establish it’s own internal rules early on. It is about 40 minutes in when we find out that the Sharks are like the Flash villain Mirror man, only instead of attacking through mirrors, the sharks can manifest through any water, even if it is only a single drop. There is a weird moment where a guy drinks a cup of water and the shark comes right out of him.
One of the things Sharknado did get right was the “gore.” It went completely over the top and there was plenty of it. There are very few “Wow, I can’t believe they did that!” moments with Ghost Shark and a lot of the attacks happened off camera. There’s a spot where everyone is at a Carwash and you only hear about the aftermath of the attack in a news report. Really? A golden moment like that and you don’t show the shark going to town? The problem with the idea of the Ghost Shark is that the gory moments have no physical impact, so when an arm is bitten off, or a body is split in two, it just looks weirdly fake and you can’t do practical effects when the whole premise is based around an “intangible” Ghost Shark.
Also I could never figure out if there was only one shark or a family of sharks. At some moments it was clearly a family of sharks (multiple fins) but most of the time the movie only shows one shark attacking. All of this skimping was probably due to a very limited budget, which makes you appreciate Sharknado all the more, because I’m fairly sure that was a skimpy budget as well, but they managed to squeeze a lot more out of it.
I wasn’t expecting Ghost Shark to be good, I just wanted to get some good campy laughs out of it and it failed that minimal test. There were times when I literally did not want to finish this movie. Ghost Shark premieres on SyFy Thursday, August 22, 2013 at 9pm.
Final Grade D