Sand Sharks
Sand Sharks, 2012, USA. Director: Mark Atkins.
For the most part, I've stayed away from the more recent crop of shark attack movies. I haven't seen any of the Sharknado movies, or 2-Headed Shark Attack, 3-Headed Shark Attack, Dinoshark, Octoshark, etc. I did start watching Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus once, but it was so lifeless that I didn't get very far. I don't know why I decided to give Sand Sharks a try over all the other options, but I do know that the opening sequence made me decide to watch beyond the opening credits. This is a movie for anyone who ever saw Jaws and was sure that even being on the beach was no guarantee of safety against a shark attack.
Sand Sharks is directed by Mark Atkins, who would go on to do a couple more big-shark movies: Planet of the Sharks and then Empire of the Sharks, both of which are set in a global warming future where there's a lot more water and plenty of giant, mutant sharks to go around. Some of the actors in Sand Sharks also went on to do further shark movies: Brooke Hogan went on to play in 2-Headed Shark Attack, and Eric Scott Woods and Gina Holden both appeared in Avalanche Sharks (aka Snow Sharks). That last one is tempting, but we'll stick with Sand Sharks for now.
Spoilers below:
Sand Sharks blows its creative wad on the basic idea that gives the movie its title: sharks that can swim through the sand and then jump out and devour people. Beyond that, plot-wise it basically follows the Jaws playbook, minus the big out-to-sea-adventure part, because, well, these sharks aren't out at sea -- and with a little bit of Deep Blue Sea thrown in for good measure. The problem is that the movie isn't sure whether it should pay homage to these other shark movies or go the route of parody. As homage, it's too on-the-nose (as in, ahem, that's not homage, dude; it's plagiarism). As parody, it kind of falls flat. Also: Did the money-grubbing characters who want the show to go on despite the threat of shark attacks really have to be portrayed as Jewish, exclaiming, for instance, "L'chaim!" and "Mazel tov!"? Did the character who is actively thrown to a sand shark by an overly ambitious, white intern really have to be the one named black character in the whole movie? Really?
Social commentary? Probably not.
Those complaints aside, you don't come to a movie like Sand Sharks for high art or sophisticated social sensibilities. At one point, our heroine tells the sheriff, "Don't go getting all Roger Corman on me yet," and when he's confused by the reference, she says, "Obviously you're not a B-movie fan." The film knows who its audience is (i.e., not the sheriff), and the folks involved seem to want nothing more than to have a blast making their own B-movie.
There is some fun to be had. The opening sequence features a dirt bike rider getting chased by a sand shark, and the image of the biker trying to outrun this huge fin slicing through the sand behind him is what made me decide I had to stick around to see where this movie would go.
The writers (not sure about the actors) had a lot of fun with puns and such, having their characters say things like, for instance: "Don't bite my head off," "We'll make a killing," "... just wanted to make sure you didn't bite off more than you can chew again," "I'm drawing a line in the sand!," "Spring break's gonna bite," "Bite me, Amanda," "You're a man-eater, aren't you?," "Think outside the sandbox," "Beach parties are to die for," and, spoken by the heroine as she delivers the killing jug of napalm to the mama shark, "Eat this, you sand of a bitch!"
Nope, I didn't mis-hear it. She said "sand of a bitch."
The heroine, by the way, is named Sandy Powers. Actually, that's Dr. Sandy Powers (played by Brooke Hogan). We don't know exactly what she's a doctor of -- she seems to be a shark researcher, but she's also hella good at medically examining dead humans (or their remaining body parts) and reconstructing attack scenes. But that's okay, the movie doesn't know what kind of doctor she is either, and I have to give them credit for at least acknowledging this: One character, on meeting her, says, "Hello, doctor -- of what, I have no idea." She's the kind of doctor who performs medical examinations in short shorts and a tank top, with no gloves, and with her hair hanging down onto the yucky parts.
I know, I know -- her bare hands and hair aren't what the filmmakers assumed I would be looking at.
She's also the kind of doctor who can create her own specialized concoction of "chum juice" to lure sharks, but then sprays down a line of the stuff in such a way that she finds herself trapped on the rocks. I guess she was trying to lure the sharks away from the beachgoers, but she had no plan for what to do beyond that point.
We do get plenty of shark attacks, most of them happening super-quick in order to distract from the bad CGI, and the result is a kind of Loony Toons visual. Take, for instance, this scene of a guy who's been buried in the sand getting grabbed and yanked under by a sand shark:
It doesn't show all that well in the still, but that little cloud of dust where his head was is pure Loony Toons imagery.
It's possible that the Loony Toons effect was intended; the movie is mostly going for laughs, not scares. Seriously, the scariest thing about the movie is this guy's sunburn:
Also, note the size of that crowd. That's supposed to be a beach party of around 1,000 people. The filmmakers have a difficult time creating the illusion of big crowds: They film too few people in too large of spaces from too far of a distance to successfully create that claustrophobic feeling of being in among a huge crowd of people. The same thing happens in the town hall scene:
Compare to the town hall scene from Jaws:
In the Sand Sharks town hall, the shot is close, but the space the people are gathered in is too large, and there just aren't enough people crowded close enough together to give that same claustrophobic, crushing crowd feel. Noise is also a factor: In Jaws, you have everybody talking over each other in complete cacophony; in Sand Sharks, there just isn't the same level of noise to create that kind of feeling. I know: budgets, resources, etc. I'm not faulting Sand Sharks for not being Jaws -- except to the extent that Sand Sharks really seems to want to be Jaws and fails. The movie even has its own Robert Shaw character in the form of Angus McSorely (Robert Pike Daniel), who speaks with a cartoonish old sea-salt accent: "I'll catch yer sand shark for ye's ... I'll catch 'im me'self."
And it apes Jaws in a fake-scare scene, too: Where in Jaws, a shark approaching a swimmer turns out to be two kids swimming under a shark-fin raft, the sheriff in Sand Sharks sees what he thinks is a sand shark and runs through the crowd only to discover that it's a shark made out of sand by some "punk kids." (Because, you know, punk kids do things like making sand sharks on the beach. "Yeah, I see your Mohawk and your tats and your switchblade. But you ever made a sand shark on the beach? That's what I thought. You ain't no punk.") The only problem is that we can tell it's a shark made of sand from the very first shot of it.
The references to Jaws go on from there ("You're gonna need a bigger beach," the sheriff says at one point), and the filmmakers throw in some refs to, among other movies, Apocalypse Now as well, because why not? The plan at the end is to lure the sharks to a secluded area of beach and then fry them with napalm, turning the sand to glass and basically creating gigantic sand shark paperweights. "I love the smell of napalm in the afternoon," one character says, and then, to attract the sharks (because sharks are attracted by noise and vibrations), they play "Ride of the Valkyries" at top volume.
It works.
"Who wants some fried fish?" -- is a line actually spoken in the film.
"Gigantic shark paperweights! We'll make a killing on e-Bay!" -- is a line that should have been spoken in the film.
Still, I have to appreciate a movie that allows its characters to hang onto their Frisbees, footballs, and water bottles while they're frantically trying to run away from the sand sharks:
Anyway, if you really want to know how to have fun with shark attacks, you need look no further than North Carolina's own Benji Hughes with his song "Shark Attack":
"They airbrushed my hair."
