I’ve reviewed my fair share of crappy movies, and after a while, one is tempted to just post a screenshot of it and let that serve as a review, even if resolved to resist labelling a piece of media “the worst ever”, because eventually something worse will surface and challenge it for the crown of “king shit”. There’s always something worse, there’s always something better out there.
Though, this is one case where i could have posted the following image and really end the review here, there’s nothing that really excuses or explains this magnificent display.
You might be curious on HOW we get to that, so let’s indulge ourselves and talk about the plot to 90210 Shark Attack, and i’m gonna point out that i never seen a single frame from the series the title spoofs (or implies to), but i don’t think it would improve my understading of the movie anyway.
I mean, this a David DeCoteau operation, yes, the same shlockmaister behind many of the Puppet Masters sequels, Creepozoids, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, countless porn and family films, one of the old guard that never really stopped putting out tons of exploitation movies, but in recent years has mostly resorted to churn into existence those “A Talking [animal noun]?!” movies, christmas TV movies, dozens of “thrillers” for the american network Lifetime.
But he still finds time to ALSO put out horror sequels, erotica like Femaliens: Seduction Of The Species, TV series like “3 Scream Queens”, and the odd shark movie like this.
So, what’s the plot? 6 students applying to become marine biologists go to a summer house on the beach. They fuck, talk, have affairs, all that jazz that exists to mostly pad out this thing, the shark comes into the “plot” via an haunted shark tooth necklace/pendant worn by one of the student, Alyssa. This because her father, who often stole and robbed artifacts from natives, went missing after he found a tribe that worshipped a great white shark, and managed to killed their “shark god”.
In a surprising presence of plot, the story about her missing father is the only reason the “school trip” was planned out, as a woman posed in as a teacher and orchestrated the summer class to make Alyssa unlock her repressed memories and confess them so that she (and a colluded student) could sell the story to a publisher and make millions.
Shame that Alyssa was actually with her father in that trip, and was cursed with a shark tooth amulet, which means when she gets aroused her upper half becomes a shark and eats people. Why wouldn’t she?
Production values are those of a low budget soap-opera, you can bet DeCoteau shot it in its goddamn summer house (the same one you can see in A Talking Cat?!, for example), not even bothering to clean his goddamn pool of dead leaves, he could at least have done that since you don’t even see the beach or the boat ride they have at one point, just gonna have to take their word since clearly DeCoteau didn’t even plan to shoot it, saves a lot of money to just shot all the movie in his house and just insert random footage of the Beverly Hills street sign, alongside obvious documentary footage of real sharks, and very crappy CG sharks just for kicks.
For cast he roped in actors who also were in previous shark movie… even if they were bit players, like Jeffrey Decker who played “Billiards Player” in Sharkenado. Alongside washed up reality shows actors, of course, to badly act their way through a movie so cheap looking you’d expect it to turn into porn at any second… and it almost does, since we get a detailed male shower, with the teacher then entering her room and staring at her student/accomplice showering for 2 full minutes.
(Editor’s Note: i was not aware of Coteau’s “1313 series” at the time of writing.)
It’s so obvious it just want to turn into porn… but it doesn’t, as we never see tits or genitalia, or coitus for that matter. Or gore, most of the kills are made by the abysmal looking CG effect for “lady with shark coming out of her head”, so shockingly bad you might not notice how it’s almost completely bloodless, aside from some obvious bit of very shitty looking practical fake blood on an actor.
Know what, for a movie that has an IMDB’s aggregate score of 1.7 out of 10… i don’t completely agree. YES, it’s shit for the birds, the dialogues are embarassing shite, the characters… the less said about it the better, the effects are REALLY BAD, the plot overall makes almost zero sense, production values are those of a sad, cheap porno, there are confusing time cuts, some of the music is placed at random, like the mash up of “moody porn jazz” and “creepy horror crescendo” that plays at one point, despite not making any sense in context nor serving any narrative purposes.
And YET, i don’t know if 90210 Shark Attack, still an embarassingly bad movie underserving of even a 3 out of 10, would make my top 10 or 5 of worst shark movies (not that i would do one because it would become outdated as soon as i publish it). At least it’s just 70 minutes (plus 5 of credits) that go by relatively fast, i could hear the atrocious dialogues and stupid characters well, there was actually some kind of plot to it – shit as it is – that actually had a beginning and ending that wasn’t just “shark happens”, and it didn’t purposedly irritates its own viewers for the sake of it.
I don’t exactly recommend it, but for cinema masochists like me, this wasn’t that hard to sit through. Take from this what you will, if there’s something to “extract” at all.
The search for a worthy companion to Jurassic Shark and Shark Exorcist continues.
Wise Cafe (International) 