More Roger Corman, continuing his b-movie legacy well into the new millennium with the “Roger Corman Presents” line of made for TV or direct-to-video b-movies he produced, this one being a spin-off of sorts of the Dino Croc series. Yes, series.
At the time of writing i haven’t got around to those, not that it matters, as a movie like this was simply bound to be made, and i’m surprised it took this long for the words “dinosaur” and “shark” to be married by the ol’ “b-movie priest”, but i guess 2010 was the year for this kind of trash, as Roger Corman also produced Sharktopus.
The first of the “Sharktopus trilogy” i mean.
Also, apparently this is a remake of 1979’s Up From The Depths, another Jaws rip-off/inspired film.
I mean, what you wanna know about a movie called “Dinoshark”?
Yes, the monster is actually a “dinosaur shark”, as in a “pliosaur” (similar to but not a plesiosaur), not that these movies care about scientific accuracy, so of course it’s just a shark with a t-rex head, that’s how the monster looks on the poster and in the actual movies. I like the monster design, so stupid but the right kind of stupid.
Speaking of which, the plot itself it’s pretty much what you’d expect.
A prehistoric baby pliosaur gets free when the Artic glacier he was conserved in calves/breaks away, and manages to survive, growing into a ferocious adult, eventually arriving from the Alaskan’s coastline to a maritime city in Mexico, Puerto Vallarta, where he starts to feed on the locals.
A guy that recently came back into town, Trace, happens to be the first one able to witness the dinoshark eating people (including his friends), tries to warn others of the creature to no result, then he resolves to kill the thing himself before even more people get chomped on.
It’s the same old shit, this time there’s no “lab accident” but it’s the ol’ Jaws template, and the movie knows it so well that the music constantly riffs on the Jaws theme, they’re clearly taking the piss but in a way that’s actually cute and funny, and there’s some wit to it as the movie this is supposed to be a remake of was also a Jaws rip-off. Also produced by Corman, obviously.
One thing that’s both great and sad it’s Roger Corman having a hand into these, and he helps making those feel like a throwback to his old shlocky movies about killer animals or monsters, as in, the movie it’s bad but definitely lands on the “so bad its good” territory way more than most of the modern b-movies that try too hard and too little in this regard, ending up as miserable crap instead.
Dinoshark it’s crap, but it’s honestly enjoyable crap, and it has enough “standards” that at the very least the non-sense plot has some logic to itself, there are plenty of kills from the creature, cheap special effects, the expected stock sequences are still enjoyable in themselves, the acting it’s bad enough to be laughed at (those “mexican” accents), and the pace is quite speedy, so you won’t be stopping the film in order to see how many minutes are left.
You won’t believe (or would, i dunno) how many of these modern b-movies can’t even manage to be anywhere entertaining, getting things wrong or doing them poorly but also being boring as shit.
While it’s not as memorable and worthy of cult status as Sharktopus (and i do miss the old physical effects shit Corman usually crafted for these cheapo B-movies), Dinoshark it’s indeed a throwback when movies like these were crap, but could actually be fun nonetheless, just the right amount of “bad” to make it mandatory for shlock buffs, keeping the tradition going in the right way.
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