You know the saying, the last year’s sensation is still fresh when gimmicks barely add anything, and by gimmicks i mean the fact Cocaine Bear was actually a big b-movie studio release last year, so by that summer you know they had someone on speed-dial to make their own knock off with 1000 times less the budget.
And it’s telling that in the past The Asylum would have made the movie themselves, but this is modern Asylum, so the first to put the “cocained killer animal mockbuster” was Mark Polonia.
…. though even that isn’t really the truth, as it’s often the case, reality is quite disappointing, as Mark Polonia just happened to release a movie called (Crab Shark) that premiered the 29th of January 2023 in Japan (apparently even actually got real screenings, which is far more unbelievable than a crab shark but it seems to be true), and he retitled it “Cocaine Shark” when releasing it in the US later that July, to capitalize on the sensation of Cocaine Bear.
Funnily beating the director of Cocaine Bear, Elizabeth Banks, to the punch in making a follow up with a shark, again based on an actual news story.
Yeah, it would be more logical if this was meant to be a mockbuster Asylum style, because it does track with the fact of the plot actually not directly ripping off the big budget Hollywood productions, as there’s not really a cocaine shark, not it is about a shark on the sauce.
Good ol’ bait and switch.
A more fitting title would be “Cocaine Sharkman”, because the plot is about a new drug based off sharks, which mutates the animals in the process, making them escape the laboratory and wreaking havoc in whatever place nearby his lakeside house Mark Polonia can use.
This it to say nothing of the other cheap ass knock offs, like Cocaine Cougar or Cocaine Werewolf, because of course they exist, if there can be blatant knock offs of Bad CGI Sharks, of course there are dozens of these ready to ship or being made as we speak for future release.
And yes i know Methgator and Cocaine Crabs From Outer Space exist, but let’s focus on the “not really drug addicted shark” at hand, let’s follow procedure, for once.
If and when you get over the fact you have been baited hard into seeing what should be called – for real this time – Undercover Shark Cop, because the main bulk is a police agent going undercover to bust out a druglord, the criminal mastermind baiting him, and these abominations derived from the drug extraction going about killing people, eventually getting in the criminals’ way because why not, it will give the film something going on in terms of “things happening”.
Its kinda funny to see the undercover cop narrate in first person like this a fuckin detective noir story, especially as he sounds vaguely Sam Elliot-esque in his telling how he felt about that and why he did the deed, and he sounds like that even when he’s not narrating in hindsight, so that tickled me, but then there’s the inescapable fact it ain’t funny enough, not even the hilarious display of people taking drugs (these people haven’t seen anyone really popping dem pills and ash, if they did they clearly don’t remember what it looks like) is enough to deflect that there’s barely any crab shark action in a movie that was originally titled “Crab Shark”.
Obviously these movies had to have a lot of “filler”, there’s gotta be more plot than needed to pad the thing out because the budget is what it is, but even at Polonia’s usual 70 minutes runtime, it feels self cannibalizing/recycling, because it does it, recycling a montage of stock footage for the “bad trips”, and regardless it feel drawn on, not even to have a variety of mutated shark monsters, you just get the sharkcrab (which is disposed of in an anticlimactic way), and a humanoid shark (hence me referencing Sharkman before) going around killing people because… i dunno why, but he’s there, he has man abs and crab claws, dunno if its a mutated human or what, since it’s not the same crab shark mutant swimming around.
.. actually i know why, same reason it’s not called “Undercover Shark Cop”, because it wants to use that for the final ending “surprise”, which would be cute if we actually saw more than the shadow play version of what that final massacre would have looked like if actually shot. Guess that stop motion melting face sequence costed more than it looked.
Honestly it feels kinda lazy even by Polonia standards, like at least there was some creativity with shit like Noah’s Shark, here he feels like he’s going through the motions, with plot pretty much on par with what Godfrey Ho’s anonymous scribes would whip out in 1 hour or less, even though there’s a bit more craft to make the non-monster scenes “believable”, he’s gotten a little better at that and so have the handful of recurring actor of his, but this is still utter no budget bottom of the barrel trash, despite me having grown a soft spot for his papermacie stop-motion monsters, and Polonia’s tenacity and prolific output. Wish he’d learned how to record audio in windy days by now, though.
It’s oddly a better attempt at making the plot work but it undermines it being a better “so bad it’s good” movie, as these movies need to be far, far crazier than this to be proper interesting and – mostly – entertaining – , quality aside, as the bar for the most ridiculous/absurd and shlocky is now a postgoal of sorts that needs some refreshing due to shameless competition for beyond the barrel’s Heisenbergian bottom.
It could be worse, it could be stuff like Lycan Colony or Suburban Sasquatch (or Fungicide), but that’s a low bar even for Mark Polonia & co, because even shit like Virus Shark is more competently put together than pretty much all of Dave Wascavage’s filmography.
But that is a tale for another shlocky time, night kids, shark bless.
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