No, it’s not a typo that they eventually went with as the official title.
The sharks in question are “dam sharks” because they act like beavers and construct dams with wood and body parts of the people they tear apart for lunch.
And despite everything that i will say about the movie, i can’t deny that this is a new one, we never saw movie sharks act in this specific manner, so Dam Sharks has already something that puts it above most of the other crappy shark movies.
It has a somewhat original idea, even thought the rest it’s so very typical and it joins the strangely populated ranks of b-movies about freshwater (or non-salt water) sharks rampaging through rivers in the swampy areas of the U.S. Interior Highlands, or bayou based rural America as a whole.
For those wondering, no, there’s no explanation given to any degree as to why the sharks (ignoring how they got there to begin with) are constructing dams with human bodies parts and branches, as if they mindlinked with a pack of beavers and Griphis from Berserk. They just do.
I’m gonna write this off as a positive because it cuts down on an even dumber and likely not fun explanation, with minutes spent in researching the shark species with a 2000’s era PC interface or boring pseudo-scientific explanation to “beaver sharks jump-attacking people on the river”.
On the other side of the plot, we have the “human buffet” to which the sharks feast on, made of a tech company’s staff going on a “wilderness retreat thingie”, and the local sheriff trying to kill off the sharks before they can claim more victims. Well, the local sheriff and the local crazy-ish redneck with a gun that doesn’t like tourists and a shady not disclosed past, gotta have that one.
Did i forget to say that the boss of the tech company it’s a smarmy control-freak douchebag, or that there is a romance subplot where the acting ability and the chemistry on display reminds one of a dead sea urchin? Or that there also scenes of random paintball matches, alongside the redneck and “beauty and the nerd romance” crap?
And yes, not only they rip-off the old classic “Smile, you son of a bitch” (and the gas cylinder as a way to explode the shark into bits, wonder where they go that from), BUT the script goes the extra mile to be even more hackeneyed, as they also steal famous quotes from Aliens, with the complimentary low-effort self-refential element of them naming Sharkenado, or saying that “they saw that done in a movie before”, the latter being said at least twice. SIGH.
Also, one character it’s named Kenny just so they can shout his name when he dies.
This one is from Cinetel, yes, they’re still around, and at least that means that they actually have a budget for this TV movie, it’s just slighly above what i call the “Asylum tier” in terms of special effects and CG, so the sharks look crappy, but WAY better than plenty of other shark movies featured here that decided money for anything wasn’t something they needed to care about.
There is a budget, so at least that means no monsters made of dried up papermaciè, crafted out of old newspapers orwhatever crap the directors had lying around in their fridge, and there are some recognizable faces for the B-movies buffs, with Jason London, Eric Paul Erickson and Matt Mercer that help salvage the overall quality of the acting from being outright crap….but still subpar.
Overall, Dam Sharks is basically a worse version of Ozark Sharks, but the somewhat original idea of a dam created by sharks with trees and human body parts gives the ordeal a grotesque shadow of novelty, helping the movie in being… again, just subpar.
Not one of the worse ones, oddly enough.