Shortly before the board had it's hiccough, there was a discussion active about the SHARK ATTACK and SHARK ZONE direct-to-video titles which made them sound very appealing in a DTV sort of way. One of the sequels in particular - SHARK ATTACK 2 or 3, maybe - was singled out as being exceptionally crazy fun. I've run into these at a local Hollywood outlet and would like to rent the most likely entertaining one. Anyone recall the thread and the specific title in question? Thanks.

Lon
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UHF Nocturne: The Lost Worlds of Late Night TV

The original thread was about SHARK ZONE, one of Nu Image‘s DTV concoctions shot in Bulgaria and directed by Danny Lerner. It‘s the only recent shark-attack movie I‘ve seen, but it‘s pretty darned entertaining if you‘re into bad ones. I‘ll just reprint my review below.

SHARK ZONE (2003)--Directed by Danny Lerner. Stars Dean Cochran, Brandi Sherwood, Alan Austin, Velizar Binev. Give Nu Image credit for giving its audience what it wants. Any movie with the word "shark" in the title had better deliver plenty of gory chompdowns, and SHARK ZONE does, in spades. Its astonishing body count almost makes up for the huge lapses in story logic, performances and production values, though if SHARK ZONE were any better, it would probably be less entertaining. Take, for instance, the staggering amount of stock footage that looks gleaned from the Discovery Channel. Notice how director Lerner uses the same clips over and over again, sometimes forgetting that large chunks of chum used to lure the sharks within camera range are present in the shot. And, heck, sometimes he even runs out of shark footage and substitutes whale footage instead. After all, who can tell the two creatures apart? Aside from everybody, that is.

Seeing great white whales substitute for sharks is nearly as funny as watching Lerner pass Bulgaria off as San Francisco. A few second-unit shots of trolleys aside, Eastern Europe hardly resembles one of America's loveliest cities, and Sam Parish's ridiculous screenplay doesn't help the charade much. You see, Parish posits that an 18th century Spanish galleon was sunk off the San Franciscan coast, taking the crown jewels, which resemble large, uncut diamonds, to the ocean floor. Sailed from Spain to the western coast of North America? Would it have hurt Parish to look at a map before he started typing his screenplay?

A group of treasure hunters, including teenaged Jimmy Wagner (Cochran, in a role tailor-made for Dean Cain) and his father (Austin), attempt to explore the sunken vessel, but are attacked by a school of man-eating sharks. This allegedly takes place miles off the Frisco coast, but since Lerner's camera accidentally captures the Sofia waterfront in the background of his shots, we'll just assume the party is really, really lost.

Ten years later, the lone survivor, Jimmy, works as the chief of security at a beach that is the site of an upcoming fiesta that, according to the mayor (also played by Austin, for no good reason except the probable shortage of English-speaking actors in Bulgaria), is an important source of tourism dollars. It doesn't look like much of a beach, and it's hard to believe that San Francisco is so dependent upon this puny little place to fill its coffers, but he's the mayor. However, when sharks attack a bunch of swimmers, Jimmy wants to close down the beaches against the wishes of the mayor, who isn't portrayed by Murray Hamilton, but might as well be. The plot pretty much follows that of JAWS from this point on, with lots of people being eaten, Jimmy pleading with the mayor to close the beach, and the mayor saying basically, "Hey, people will be okay if they keep their eyes open." And as if ripping off JAWS wasn't enough, Parish and Lerner provide us with a parallel plot, this one involving a Russian mobster (Nu Image regular Binev) who kidnaps Jimmy's son and forces him to take his goons to the location of the sunken Spanish ship (remember that?), so they can steal the diamonds. Jimmy never does kill all of the sharks, and the movie ends after about 90 minutes feeling only half-finished.

Still, I really don't mind, because Nu Image is like a hilarious parallel universe where anything can happen. Russian mobsters can control San Francisco's economy, sharks with extremely fake-looking Styrofoam fins travel in schools and chomp down on dozens of victims who shouldn't have been in the water anyway, beach security guards boss around helicopter pilots and blow up sharks with grenades, and said security guard can end up married to a gorgeous supermodel (played by Cochran's real-life wife Sherwood) who makes for the world's least convincing housewife. Oh, and bartenders can moonlight as macho shark hunters.

Back to giving Nu Image credit, SHARK ZONE looks glossy, considering its budget, which forced Lerner to substitute cardboard sets for luxury boats. Some of the visual effects, like the sharks (which roar, by the way...) ripping into human bodies, look pretty good, as does the miniature work. The CGI is awfully shoddy though, particularly the effects that provide Lerner's final shock. Nu Image appears to be grooming Cochran for DTV stardom, casting him in other projects like AIR MARSHAL and TARGET OF OPPORTUNITY. Serge Colbert provided the score, and I suspect at least one of SHARK ZONE's stock footage shots to have been swiped from JAWS 3-D.

Nu Image also made a trio of SHARK ATTACK thrillers, as well as movies about killer octopi and crocodiles. I prefer their military-themed action pictures, such as SPECIAL FORCES and the OPERATION DELTA FORCE series, which offer some big explosions and a lot of bullets on their million-dollar budgets. Best of all is U.S. SEALS II, directed by Isaac Florentine and as close to approximating the style and energy of a Hong Kong martial-arts film as any American production ever has.