
Space sharks as a subgenre have recently made its mark in the horror genre as a strange phenomenon. To this accumulation comes the recently released Space Sharks, which joins Iron Sky and its sequel Sky Sharks as well as Shark Side of the Moon among others. However, none of them can compare to the classic episode of The Outer Limits titled The Invisible Enemy which definitely beats the possibility of a whole different type of scope.
What has grabbed our attention now is the commercial space flying saucer The Clairvoyant, arriving back on Earth with a set of alien sea and plant life, which quite frankly consisted of what seemed to be some small legged foot sharks almost. The researchers do appear to be thinking of the jolly images of big research funding in their heads.
The team consists of Dr. Johnson (Eric Roberts, Exceptional Beings, Runaway Train), Dr. Thompson (Carl Crew, Devilreaux, The Forbidden Dimensions), and Dr. Hansen whose birth name is Scott Schwartz but has played in such diverse entities as A Christmas Story and The Toy, Raiders of the Living Dead, Café Flesh 2, and even voiced Agent Big Knob in Booby Trap. Huge mix for such a profession.
But the only thing in their future is a meteor storm that damages the ship and makes them land somewhere in the vicinity of the forests in California. It also in some way ends up with the sharks becoming the size of a human learning to breathe air walking on their feet, and going out to hunt humans as if they were in a remake of Without Warning.
Writer director Dustin Ferguson (Cocaine Cougar, Amityville in the Hood), is probably familiar if not particularly liked, by the regular readers. Much of that can be attributed to his generic non-storylines where an almost random cast of characters played by actors for hire just wander somewhere in the frame and then get killed off. They do not even have any impact on the plot or the deaths for that matter. It is almost like an 80s slasher movie minus the appealing gory elements.
And Space Sharks do fit that model once the alien organisms come to Earth. It’s not the sharks but rather plants that are said to be triffids that do most of the killing. Their presence was a nice twist because the sharks are able, and do, to make themselves almost invisible for most of the time only to emerge for a few seconds to kill someone in a spray of computer generated blood.
There’s also Nora (Allie Perez, Amityville Emanuelle, Stokes River Haunting), the last competent member of the crew that is still alive and is doing alright, all things considered. Presumably with a bunch of rehabilitate junkies, headed by counselor Rochelle (Brinke Stevens, The Slumber Party Massacre, Smart House) instead of highly skilled mercenaries, the film’s last half hour will see her relive scenes from Predator. But even that was asking a bit much, as the main plot quickly ends and we’re just handed a lot of time-filling nonsense to reach the seventy-minute mark.
But during that period, yes, Space Sharks does borrow plenty of ideas from Predator, the cloak, the heat vision, the hanging skin, a body, etc. Sadly, with the exception of some spacecraft footage and the triffids, much of the effects are better than the usual Ferguson films we get but are still nothing grand.
Perhaps this would be the best way to sum Space Sharks as a whole: it is better than most of what we have seen from Ferguson. But the absence of decent deception involving a conspiracy theorist who roams the scenes chattering on his cell phone, and another starring Mel Novak (Game of Death, An Hour to Kill) as Nora’s dad whose storyline is abandoned completely, prevent it from being more than passable in the best case scenario.
For movies like Space Sharks visit – 123movies