Since i couldn’t find a copy of Mississippi River Sharks NOT dubbed in hindi (not offense, but i don’t understand a lick of it), i’m doing this one.
Never heard of it before, just randomly happened upon it while browsing Amazon Prime Video, under one of its alternative titles, the imaginative “Killer Shark”.
Compared to the choking hazard sharks, i guess.
For a moment i thought i already reviewed this one, but no, just happens to predate the 2017 Trailer Park Shark (reviewed under its DVD title of Shark Shock), and it’s also set in the Louisiana … and it’s ALSO directed by Griff Furst, which is definitely owning the “swamp & redneck shark & gator movies” niche.
Story is about what you’d expect, this time the sharks does the routine usually reserved to toxic barrels of radioactive ooze, as he drops from a truck into a water tank and so he manages to enter the muddy Louisiana waters, dropping into the Atchafalaya Basin. Which endangers the upcoming annual alligator festival (which i don’t think involves eating alligator meat, i hope not), so it comes to the usual random cluster of characters to save the un-chomped folks from the shark.
Leaving aside the contrived method in which the shark enters the plot (it involves a boring subplot about the sheriff illegaly trafficking rare and exotic animals), itì’s the same old crap: teenager getting wasted and trying to fuck despite the pervy police officers, and the usual pointless shit to witness before we can re-enact Jaws for the zillionenth time (including the “we not stopping the festival cause money” scene), until the finale were we see the “crew” destroy the shark with some improptu “hillbilly ingenuity”, until – what do you know – there was another shark.
Thankfully it’s not the case here, at least this one avoids hinting at sequels that probably (please) will never get made.
I don’t know why this one has better production values than both Sand Sharks and Trailer Park Shark, but it does (when it doesn’t have scenes shot at dawn but way too murky for their own good). And it’s way less offensive in regards to the depiction of “rednecks”, Trailer Park Shark might as well have a bad animated feature, so cartoonish and outlandish its characters were. Sure, here we get the “bayou b-movie drunk” and the dickhead corrupt sceriff, but for the rest, i would go as far as call them characters, mostly the staff of a restaraunt (and an undercover ranger) that goes on a shark hunt in order to get the sheriff off their backs and to keep their jobs, instead of getting closed.
The practical gore effects are passable, the CG for the sharks and gators…. forget about it, you already know it’s crap, most likely in the exact way you’re imagining it to be. The shark itself it’s basically a megalodon, they never call it as such, but it has a super tough hide, it’s way too big and old, so yeah, i’m saying it’s a megalodon, fuck it, because it couldn’t be just a regular shark. It’s no Super Shark, though.
Acting is slighly above average for these SyFy TV movies about sharks, it does help to have a cast with actually recognizable actors, like Christopher Berry (12 Years A Slave, Django Unchained, Free State Of Jones), ex-baseball champion Wade Boggs (channeling Tommy Lee Jones here) and Marcus Lyle-Brown (Battleship, Jimmy Bobo, The Host… the 2013 sci-fi romance adapted by another Stephen Meyers’ book series). Mostly wasted talent in a movie like this, as you can actually tell right away these people can do way better than this, but the material is what it is.
Overall, kinda watchable, kinda boring, like most of these movies, they’re not made to be watched all in a single sitting like i did, they’re engineered so you can watch a movie on TV while eating or doing other things, designed to be kinda watched, kinda just heard as you go on Twitter to kill some time until a commercial break happens, or the movie finally gets to the point.
Middling, so middling i really don’t have anything else to say.
Pointless, generic, but harmless.
Wise Cafe (International) 