Shark Season (2020) [REVIEW] | Tis Is

We do gotta pick every stitch, it is always season of scripts running down the ditch,

sharks are out to make it rich, must be the season of sons of a bitch

I’m sorry Donovan, but these fuckin movies often leave me little choice but just invent shit like this, especially when scriptwriters don’t even bother to make the premise stand out for movies like these, so at a glance they mesh all together and often can be really sketchly summed, as they barely have anything to say or show. Especially when they keep getting released under alternate titles that are either mystifing, deceptive, or already used by older, better known shark movies. Because fuck you.

There’s no other explanation than “fuck you” when you release this recent shark movie as “Shark Attack” for its UK DVD release. And as “Deep Blue Nightmare” for US TV broadcasts. (sighs)

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The Reef (2010) [REVIEW] | Seas For Fears

No, no the kids movie, you silly.

Know what? Let’s talk about a good shark movie, for a change, let’s talk about The Reef, from director-writer Andrew Traucki, here at his second directorial role for a feature lenght film, after debutting with Black Water, another survival horror film, but about a saltwater crocodile (later followed by Black Water Abyss).

This one is often brought up when discussing the best shark movies, and by pure coincidence it’s another Australian production, like Bait 3D, which happens to be one of my favorites and one of the better received shark flick all around. And boy do we need good ones to offset the avalanche of shit shark movies pumped out on yearly basis, we really do need some good one once in a while.

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47 Meters Down (2017) [REVIEW] | The Real Cage Dive

Once more we are more on the serious side of the shark movie, with the rare UK production, among the overwhelming number of american and australian ones, 47 Meters Down (or 47 Metres Down, as my UK DVD release says, thought it was just a typo on the cover art and the back of the box, but nope, it’s just unsure how exactly “europey” it wants to sound), which would also “inspire” the third Open Water film, released just months after this one.

But we’ll talk about what differentiates the two movies when talking of Open Water 3, for what concerns 47 Meters Down, you just have to know it’s about two sisters that decide – after the more introverted one breaks up with her boyfriend – to spend a vacation together in Messico.

While there, they decide to try something extreme and go on a cage scuba dive, but due to the wire malfunctioning, they end up being trapped in a shark cage underwater (at the depth the title specifically refers to), and they desperate struggle to escape while great white sharks siege them.

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Open Water 3: Cage Dive (2017) [REVIEW] | Wisdom N’ The

11 years after Adrift, Lionsgate felt the time was right to resume the “series”, and might as well drop any pretense, so they just released it as Open Water 3 right away, which surely prompted viewers to ask “was there a second one?”. Again, not that it matters because these are completely standalone stories, so you could waltz in theathers in 2017 without any real need to see the “previous ones”.

Not that many moviegoers are bound by that anyway.

If the subtitle sound somewhat familiar, it’s because this third installment in the Open Water series clearly took wind of what Dimension Films was cooking up with 47 Meters Down, it’s not that there’s a copyright on the concept of “cage dive scuba session goes wrong, with sharks”, but this one was released the same year, just 2 months after 47 Meters Down, so comparisons are bound to be made..

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Open Water 2: Adrift (2006) [REVIEW] | Sequel Sharks

What happens when you get to do a sequel that’s really not a sequel, but another iteration on the same basic premise? You get slapped for asking obvious and stupid rethorical questions, as you know damn well the industry will conjure series out of unrelated movies anyway, so doesn’t matter that not even the production company is the same as Open Water, we’ll release it with a different name first and then slap “Open Water 2” when it hits home video, passing the original title as a subtitle. Not to be confused with the 1993 movie by Christian Duguay, also called “Adrift”.

This one is directed by Hans Horn, also behind german produced TV movie like Death Water (Tod aus der Tiefe) and with a new movie in pre-production, Going Down, which sound like it’s gonna be an unofficial Open Water or a rip-off. But we’ll see about that.

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Open Water (2003) [REVIEW] | Fear Of The Shark

Open Water 2003.png

Didn’t plan to review this, but suddendly i saw “this film will be unavailable the 31 of august”. Thanks, Amazon Prime Video, wanna remove first some garbage that probably isn’t even really licensed so much as “uploaded” by random persons? No? Thank you.

So anyway, Open Water, the first one of the not-series, as there are two more, but there’s no story continuity, and the second one often isn’t even titled as a sequel, which is fairly common for these realm of horror thriller about killer animals… or killer anything, to be even more honest, and pretty any distribution company “has” to have it’s own shark series with movies that just add numbers at the end of titles and share the same overall concept or premise.This is Lionsgate’s. Continua a leggere “Open Water (2003) [REVIEW] | Fear Of The Shark”