Well, it's finally here. It's the last day of Shark Week and we're finally at the film that started it all off. To recap: a couple of months ago a friend and I were talking about how bad we thought horror movies could get while idly exploring YouTube. Eventually we came across a film called Shark Exorcist and my friend insisted that I review it, for science if nothing else. I countered that if I was going to review something so potentially bad, then I really needed to review some good shark movies as well to balance it all out and provide comparison, and thus the idea for Shark Week was born.
A Satanic nun (apparently called Sister Linda St.Blair) kills a woman and dumps the body in the water as a sacrifice to Satan himself to give her an "avenger". Satan must have had a lot of things on his to-do list, however, as it's a whole year before he gets back to her and drops a demonic shark with glowing yellow eyes into a lake in the town of Paris Landing to chow down on anyone who steps into the water. A psychic investigator from a reality TV show turns up to investigate the rising body count and connects with a demonic presence in the water. To make matters worse, Ali, a young woman who is the only person to have survived the demon shark's attacks, starts to act strangely; she is now possessed by the Satanic shark spirit as well and is leading even more people to their doom. Finally a priest arrives in the town as well to investigate things and it becomes up to him to exorcise the shark demon(s) and save everyone...
Warning for emetophobes: people vomit in this movie. Not particularly convincingly, mind, but it was still enough to make me sympathy retch (although to be fair I do have a mild case of the flu right now). Nethertheless I felt it's only right to warn people, in case they end up watching this movie themselves - perhaps on a dare, or perhaps a masked intruder has broken into your house and forced you to watch this movie or see your family and pets die.
Shark Exorcist is 67 minutes long (according to my copy at least). Of those 67 minutes, about nine of them are technically classed as "credits", although there's a couple of post-credit scenes that reduce the actual credits down to 2-3 minutes (and admit it; you would have been surprised if there had been enough people working on this film to warrant nine minutes of credits). Still, that means that this film is at most 65 minutes long, which doesn't even class it as a feature film under the Screen Actors Guild at all, and yet there are still long sequences where nothing happens at all. The worst offender for this was a scene at the very end: a young woman arrives at the beach, strips down to her bikini and lies down to sunbathe, whereupon a man who had been badly stalking her from behind a tree wanders over and proceeds to take several "creep shots" of her as she "sleeps", debating whether or not to give her a quick grope while he's there. (At this point I feel I should mention that Shark Exorcist's director Donald Farmer also directed, among other films, Savage Vengeance, also known as I Spit on Your Grave 2.) And this scene adds nothing to the plot. Nothing.
The production values for Shark Exorcist are also pretty much non-existent (although IMDB says they had a budget of $300,000). My first clue for this was when I saw the trailers that came before the main feature - both Asylum films and both looking much better than Shark Exorcist. When your movie can be compared unfavourably to Three-Headed Shark Attack, then you should probably take that as a clue that your film is not good. My second clue came when I realised that all of the cast's phones were of the same type - the same type of phone that I use. And I know my phone is pretty cheap. The movie's gore effects are non-existent; they don't seem to have any microphones on set other than the ones attached to the camera... Really, do I need to go on?
I don't think there's a single aspect of Shark Exorcist that isn't terrible. Lines are flubbed or delivered badly ("We're going to need a bigger cross!" said by one actress apparently on the verge of hysterical laughter), and I'm pretty sure that one of the crew was banned from being within 100 meters of children because there are two obviously adult women playing allegedly young girls during the course of the film. And perhaps the greatest sin of all for a sharksploitation film - the demonic shark is barely in the film at all, and even then they mostly just recycle the same bad CGI shot each time.
Satan should sue for defamation of character.
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