Swamp Shark

Exotic animal smuggling gone awry. An obscurely armoured shark that can punch through the side of a tanker. Kristy Swanson, the original Buffy The Vampire Slayer, looking to hunt it down. This ought to be a fun film, even if nobody hoped for it to be a good one. In actuality, it's all mud and no teeth.

Most bad shark movies have one factor guaranteed to redeem them: the actual shark action. Even the dismal 2-Headed Shark Attack has its pointy toothed antihero ripping people in two, whilst Shark In Venice gives a gondola good going-over. Here, though, there's really very little shark action at all. Hardly anyone gets munched and when they do we are offered neither tension nor gore. A scene in which a young woman removes her bikini top with her nipples just out of shot sums up the problem with the film. It's curiously coy, and frankly, when your shark is your only asset, it had better put out.

Wrapped around the shark plot here is a tedious hick drama set among the residents of a small Atchafalaya Basin community where the sheriff is corrupt (of course) and Swanson is a bar owner with an idiot drunk boyfriend who keeps starting fights. Somebody probably thought this would make viewers laugh. Jason Rogel gives the only thing approaching an acting performance as the local geek with a crush on Swanson's character's wee sister, a painfully square teen who falls in with the Wrong Crowd. There's a mysterious stranger with secrets, who singularly fails to engage, and a subplot in which the town is preparing for one of those inevitable festivals. This, being alligator focused, at least provides for a bit of alternative dangerous animal peril, but the film has none of the class of Mega Python Vs Gatoroid.

Unusually, this film has opted to use a real shark for some scenes, but this only adds to the disappointment because it's just not big enough to look scary compared to the monster marine maneaters we've grown used to - nor does it measure up to the hype delivered by the script. Swamp Shark just doesn't offer enough for viewers to get their teeth into.