| Shark Hunter Released: 2001 MPAA Rating: R Genre: Predatory Animal Nuts And Bolts: Dopey looking actor tries to seek work by signing on to a boring film about a big giant fish that swims VERY ferociously but does little else. Summary: I'll let you all know something right now. I was not paying a whole hell of a lot of attention to this movie, and more than a few times I've found myself dozing off. So this summary is going to be a bit sparser than my usual long-winded rants. Spencer Northcut is a troubled soul. You see, a handful of years ago his family and he were fucking about in the water when they were suddenly swallowed by some unseen menace from the deep. Spencer was the only one that survived and he has since sworn vengeance against the sea-critter that lunched on his family. But Spencer's got MAD skills. Over the course of years, he amasses a small fortune, becomes an oceanographer, a paleontologist, and an engineer and manages to make his very own custom-made super-submarine. This guy is like Batman, Captain Ahab and Jacques Cousteau all rolled into one. As we cut to the present, we find that an underwater research station operated by a bunch of finicky Frenchmen is completely destroyed from an unknown underwater predator. Spencer and his sub, the Argus are assigned to check it out and he is teamed up with a crew of uninteresting people to help him track down this monster. He eventually discovers that what he is hunting is a megalodon (A prehistoric shark). Megalodons are said to reach a size in excess of forty feet; twice the size of your average great white shark. The Argus and her crew begin patrolling the waters near the destroyed research station. Almost immediately the crew begin bickering with one another. Northcut argues with some melodramatic little French dude. The French guy argues with a tough marine named Rob Harrington. And nearly everybody else plugs their fingers in their ears whenever shipmate Cheryl begins squawking about something. There's also a bunch of other loser hanging about. Their function is to basically repeat the same lines that the guy next to him just muttered. You see this type of shit all the time in underwater flicks. The dialogue usually consists of "Down Three Degrees!" followed by "Down three degrees sir." That kind of repetitious crap can get really annoying after awhile. That kind of repetitious crap can get really annoying after awhile. After about an hour of watching these guys give each other the "serious" face, we finally to get to fuck around with the megalodon for a bit. The Argus tracks the thing down and everyone remarks about the size of it. Northcut just wants to kill the thing, but Cheryl wants to capture it alive for the sake of scientific posterity. But I suspect it's only because she's horny and all she really wants to do is get herself some megalocock. Nothing less than eight feet will satisfy her. These losers concoct this hair-brained scheme wherein they plan on sending Harrington off in a mini-sub in order to bait the shark. This way they can keep it localized so the Argus can zap it with its super-mega torpedoes. This is obviously just a plan to get rid of Harrington because he's a serious pain in the ass. And Harrington is so fucking dumb, he actually falls for it! So Harrington goes out in the mini-sub and buzzes around the shark doing everything he can to piss it off. The shark flushes about for a while but doesn't really do much. The Argus and the mini-sub start firing little harpoons and tranquilizer darts at the shark but they don't accomplish fuck-all except for irritating the hell out of the megalodon. So the shark dives downward and comes back up right inside the little hole that the mini-sub was launched from. He manages to chomp down one crony and bump another guy into some equipment. Then he leaves and goes off on his own. Meanwhile, Harrington is still fucking about in the mini-sub. The shark sideswipes him and fucks up his engines. So the brainiacs on the Argus realize that they have to HARPOON the mini-sub in order to get him back. Surprisingly, this dumb trick actually works. The Argus continues to fuck about with the shark some more, but this plan of attack proves to be about as effective as the last plan of attack. The shark bumps the sub and everything starts going haywire. People are running around screaming and barking orders and everything is a complete and total mess. At some point, someone trips and knocks over the dylithium crystals used to power the warp core and Ensign LaForge is worried because the warp core is going to explode destroying everybody (Or something like that). Cheryl is sectioned off from the rest of the crew and begins screaming into the intercom. Spencer Northcut meanwhile can no longer stand listening to this whining harpy and decides to take off in the mini-sub. He launches from the Argus with plenty of time to escape before the whole thing goes nuclear. Yep. The Argus explodes and the shark had little or nothing to do with it. It's a shame too, because Cheryl never gets the chance to ride on that megalocock. But now it's just down to Spencer and the shark. He drives the mini-sub deep into the shark's mouth and blows it up destroying both himself and the shark. To be honest, I don't blame him. If I knew that I would be starring in a movie this fucking lame, I would prefer death as an alternative as well. I'm sure I flubbed some of the details here or there. As I was watching the movie I was half listening to my friend telling me about the season finale to Star Trek: Enterprise. Sadly, his Star Trek story was more entertaining than this piece of shit film. So if I made any mistakes in the above, then I apologize. My biggest mistake was failing to change the channel five minutes into this dumb-ass movie. Acting / Dialogue: Fucking pathetic. This is without a doubt the most boring-ass cast of characters that I have ever seen in a movie. The fucking shark had more personality than these goons. They aren't even characters. They're just archetypes with name tags. We've got the revenge-driven know-it-all, the angry militant black guy, the obsessed scientist, and the intelligent yet oddly attractive token female. And for every one of these predatory animal movies, you have to sit through some pretentious impassioned speech about how modern man doesn't respect big dumb animals and that its really just God punishing us for not showing the proper appreciation for things that are higher up on the food chain. And to counter these Darwin apologists, you need someone else who is the over-zealous yet markedly evil corporate opportunist with dreams of opening up a chain of Sharkburger restaurants. I am so sick and tired of this crap. The worst character in this movie is Cheryl. This is a chick whose biggest claim to fame is being cast as Go-Go Dancer #3 in an Austin Powers movie. At least in Austin Powers, she had the decency to keep her damn pie-hole shut. But in Shark Hunter, she is whinging and blubbering every five goddamn minutes. I don't know if its because she's a shitty actress, or maybe its just because she was given crap lines. Or maybe I'm just pissed off because she didn't take her top off. Gore: NONE! In the brief sad history of cheap Jaws rip offs I have never seen such a sanitized, PG-rated bloodless movie. The shark eats ONE fucking guy, and you don't even see it all-that clearly. It's sad when you can spot more blood in the climatic scenes from Godzilla Versus Gigan than you can in this. And I'm not even exaggerating this time. Guilty Pleasures: Any movie that features an attractive female character but fails to show nudity will always be a sore spot with me. But its made even worse in a film like this. The female in this situation is a scientist. In the real world female scientists are only attractive in pornos and Eminem videos. Actual female scientists tend to be plump middle-aged ugly women with thick horn-rimmed glasses, short dye-colored curled up hair and at least one prosthetic limb. So when you have a movie that hires its cast based on nothing more than filling out the eye-candy quota, it behooves them to at least provide some actual fucking eye-candy! If the character of Cheryl had exposed at least a partial nip, then I might have respected this film a bit more. What other point did she serve? And before someone accuses me of being an angry, lonely misogynist, let me just clarify: This chick offers NOTHING else! If she had been an interesting character, I probably wouldn't care very much that she doesn't show her tits. But she's not interesting. She's irritating. And I feel no shame towards bashing the shit out of this movie because of it. The Good: In all fairness, the shark effects are pretty decent. When I watch a movie like this, there's the logistical side of my brain that tells me that what I am seeing is actually a computer-generated image. But then there's the creative side of my brain that attempts to translate said image into something that I consider believable. CGI animation is still going through its birthing stages and at this point in time, its rare to find computer work that is convincing. I guess the FX crew realized the limit of their abilities and made sure that their shark wouldn't wiggle around too wildly thus revealing its computer generated nature. I suppose I should respect the fact that they were at least aware of their own shittiness. But it still doesn't make up for the fact that the movie blows. The Bad: Why? Why why why why why why why? Why was this movie even made? What goal were the producers attempting to fulfill? Were they worried that maybe the sphincter-licking stooges at the Sci-Fi channel didn't have enough killer animal movies to subject us to? Or maybe they thought that four Jaws movies, three Shark Attack movies and Deep Blue Sea weren't enough to satisfy our shark fetish. Or maybe director Matt Codd just hates me personally. Why, Matt, Why? Is it because I used to give you wedgies all the time during gym class? Is it because I told your mom that you like to dress up in women's lingerie? Is it because I spiked your diet Tab soft drink with laxatives back in '86? Whatever could I have possibly done to deserve this? The worst thing about Shark Hunter is that we have a movie that deals with a shark that is supposed to be twice the size of a great white. But we really have no way of knowing just how big it is. The only point of reference we have is by comparing its size to that of the Argus. But since we don't know how big the Argus is, how the fuck are we supposed to guess how big the shark is? On top of that, this has got to be the laziest killer shark I have ever seen in a horror movie. Aside from one triumphant gesture wherein he pokes his snout through the asshole of the sub, he really doesn't do fuck-all but swim around and snarl menacingly. In fact, if everyone else had just left him the fuck alone, he likely would have continued on his way and not bothered another living soul for the rest of his life. Which brings me to my next gripe. Spencer Northcut is not only out to hunt Megalodons - he wants this specific megalodon - the one who ate his family. Yes, this is a mission of REVENGE! In fact…it's also a mission of familiarity. Wasn't this the same bizarre revenge-driven drivel that Lorraine Gary's character went through in Jaws IV: The Revenge? I cannot comprehend how embarrassingly pathetic it is to know that a screen writer had to rip off the plot line to Jaws IV in order to justify his shitty-ass shark movie. That's about as low as low can go. This movie offers nothing. It is a jumble of boring uninteresting characters, a clumsy lazy script, and a fat fucking shark that appears for about five minutes out of the whole goddamn film. Don't even bother with this one. Shove a carrot sideways up your ass instead. It'll be more satisfying. Great Lines: "I think we're going to need a bigger sub" -If I hear one more lame take on the "bigger boat" joke from Jaws, I'm going to kill something small and cute. Overall Rating: 2 out of 10 severed heads. And that's ONLY because the shark FX weren't entirely shitty. |
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