I had some real problems coming up with today's film for Shark Week. I knew I was starting the week with Jaws, and finishing with the film that started this whole thing off, so that just left the films in the middle. Most of them were was enough to decide on, but the final film just kept eluding me. I was almost ready to go for the low-hanging fruit of a Sharknado movie when, during a trip to my local brick-and-mortar entertainment store I spotted a movie. Or to be more exact I spotted the tagline of a movie, which read simply in large text, "Dolph Vs Shark," and at that point I knew I had found my missing shark movie.
Welcome to Shark Lake.
The town of Lake Tahoe (or possibly Alpine Lake; the movie seems a little confused about this point), Nevada is a quiet town, where the biggest thing to happen in recent years seems to have been the arrest of Clint Grey for smuggling dangerous exotic animals. Five years later and Clint is released from prison, and the cop who arrested him, Meredith Hernandez, is afraid that he's going to come for his daughter Carly, whom she had adopted after his arrest. She and the town are about to have a bigger problem, however - something in the lake is stalking and devouring people in the water. It turns out that, just before he was arrested, Clint released a pregnant bull shark into the lake, and now she and her pups are enjoying the rich pickings of their hunting ground. Now both Clint and Meredith are setting out to hunt the sharks before the body count rises any further...
Despite getting top billing, tag line billing and a prominent place on all the posters and box art, Dolph Lundgren is not the primary protagonist of Shark Lake. In fact, I think that Clint Grey (possible alternative names for him probably included Brick Hardmeat and Trunk Slamchest) only appears in about a third of the film total, and doesn't even meet up with the film's actual protagonist, cop Meredith Hernandez, until the climax of the film. This ends up making the film feel like two films that have been awkwardly stapled together - three if you count the Lifetime Movie of the Week subplot of Hernandez trying to abuse her position as a Sheriff's deputy to stop Clint from seeing his daughter. Really, Clint and Hernandez's separate hunts for the sharks are so far removed from each other that you have to wonder why they bothered to have two separate plots to begin with.
Shark Lake clearly took a lot of notes for its plot from a couple of viewings of Jaws. Several of the shark victims are very similar to the victims in Jaws (such as a couple who break off from a beach party/rave to go for a midnight swim and come to a sticky end); an oceanographer turns up (pretty much out of nowhere) and teams up with the cop to hunt the sharks; and a bounty is put on the sharks to encourage every fisherman with more guts than brains to go out hunting as well. Just about the only point missing is the town mayor trying to cover everything up for the sake of tourism. There's also a slimy and utterly odious British TV personality who turns up for a short while wanting to film his hunting of the shark(s) for his show, and if I had thought that I had hated some of the cast of Shark Night and wanted them to die, then I had clearly underestimated the depths of my hate for incidental, "comic relief" characters.
It's clear to me that Shark Lake was really trying hard to be a decent somewhere-between-B-and-Z-movie at least - I was particularly impressed by the fact that they went to the effort to research a shark that could actually live in a freshwater lake - but I think things like the budget let them down in the end. The CGI was... not good, to put it mildly, particularly the blood and gore effects, and some of the shark effects weren't much better. The fact that they had two plots that could have easily been merged together or even made into their own separate movies, but instead were kept apart until the very end, didn't help matters much either. And finally, I can't help but think that any film featuring Dolph Lundgren so prominently should have had more explosions, fist fights and the like. Hell, I wouldn't even have complained (much) if the there had been a scene where Clint Grey beat a shark to death with his fists. But let's be honest here - I wasn't expecting a masterpiece here and neither should anyone else. It's a silly, slightly goofy B-movie that takes itself too seriously sometimes, and as long as you go into it remembering that then you won't be too disappointed.
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