Read the title. Read it again. And yes, that is the original title.
It pretty strongly implies this is a shark-centric Indiana Jones rip-off, and low budget full movie lenght parodies can be atrocious and ungodly, so this already should put you in the defensive. It really should.
But experience did “tell me” that wasn’t the case either, it would have been weirder if i didn’t heard more people talk about the oddity of a shark movie parodying Indiana Jones, and yes, it’s just another fuckin shark flick about a prehistoric giant shark released by the usual oil drilling accident, with the beast rampaging in the waters of a small lake community.
It’s only 70 minutes long (actually, just 60, jesus christ), it’s not directed dy Donald Farmer, how bad can it be?
It can be Jurassic Shark’ level of bad, it’s from the same director, writer and producer, Brett Kelly (credited here as Scott Patrick), and i genuinely, fully hated Jurassic Shark, arguably one of the very worst shark movies i’ve ever seen, maybe surpassed only by the unholy sin of Shark Exorcist.
It’s hard not to bring that movie up because it’s clearly shot in the same identical locations as Jurassic Shark, i recognize the lake and woods, and by that i mean somewhere in Ontario, Canada, from where the director is from, which makes sense since it’s clearly shot in someone’s hometown with a cheaply rented camera and with “actors” salvaged from his friend list or neighbours.
Of course this kind of almost “home video feature movie”is 60 % to 70 % padding made of random people kissing, girls showing tits, bikinis, asses, and that sorta of things.. Raiders Of The Lost Shark is no exception, since the deceptive title exist only to attract people in, and the plot is paper thin.
But surprisingly this is almost a sequel, as in we have a character that survived from the first one… one of the two random girls in bikini in Jurassic Shark’s intro, now a teacher. Almost as in there’s no actual continuity with that movie’s plot, and they retcon shit into it with obvious new footage shot in sepia tone to make it a flashback… of things that never happened in the first movie.
Also, there’s a scientist, the shark now is a bit radioactive, programmed to hunt humans specifically, and can actually fly like a flipping swallow. Because. No raiding of any kind happens, btw, not that they could even attempt an Indiana Jones parody, they couldn’t even afford the acquascooters depicted in the poster, so i’m not surprised you don’t even see those in the actual movie.
Mind you, this is still abhorrent: the acting is total amateur hour (so much you can tell someone never acted in anything before, ever), the effects for the shark are abysmal CG shit (outside of a few shots were it’s a goofy puppet), the shark kills all happen off-camera with almost no blood, it looks like a school project, the script…whatever. If i still used ratings this wouldn’t get even a 2 out of 10.
BUT i will say that it’s a bit better, as in Brent Kelly did save some money for the a new camera and sound equipment, so it’s still amateur hour but production values are… less worse, it looks less like a bad porn and now you can hear the character dialogues clearly, instead of having them drowned by random background noises like the actors stepping over fallen leaves (i’m not being hyperbolic, btw).
And the attempts at being deliberately here managed to get a couple of laughs and giggles out of me, the french-canadian couple speaking french with subtitles was adorable, the actor playing the piratey speaking sea captain clearly was having fun, and the couple of dumb ass sheriff and deputy clearly trying to do half-assed B-movie southern american county cops accents were cute.
It’s more than i usually get out of bottom of the barrel movies like this (when the poster it’s REALLY the best part), and it’s really short, 60 minutes it ends, the rest is 6/7 minutes of credits. Small mercies, i guess.
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