Dinoshark starts in Alaska where a huge chunk of ice falls into the Ocean, frozen deep within the 150 million year old ice is a small prehistoric shark that promptly thaws out & swims away. Jump forward ‘Three Years Later’ & the prehistoric dinosaur shark is now fully grown & has made it’s way to the warmer waters of Puerta Vallarta where the holiday season is in full swing. With plenty of tourists for the shark to feed on it’s not long before all sorts of body parts are being washed up on local beaches, after one of their friends is eaten boat Captain Trace McGraw (Eric Balfour) & marine biologist Carol Brubaker (Iva Hasperger) decide to team up together to hunt down & kill the monster shark…
Directed by Kevin O’Neill who also made the crappy creature feature Dinocroc (2004) one has to say that Dinoshark is yet another awful Sy-Fy Channel creature feature of no real worth whatsoever, why I keep watching these things baffles me, it really does. Personally I am getting sick of these awful creature feature films that play out exactly the same, that have terrible stories that all seem to unfold in the same way with some creature or other killing various people then a few brave souls decide to take the beast on & kill it. Yawn. Dinoshark feels like a rip-off of Jaws (1975) as you might expect, the shark monster, the holiday resort, the tourist season, the greedy businessman, various people being attacked from beneath the water & even the music is often a rip-off of the Jaws theme. Maybe I have had my fill of these awful creature features but I found Dinoshark to be even more lame than usual with terrible CGI, badly staged attack scenes, the majority of the film looking like a tourism video with pointless shots of local dancers, wide shots of the locations & the like that just slow the film down & make it even more tedious. The character’s are all awful, the plot is none existent & could have been written on the back of a postage stamp with room to spare & I sort of switched off about thirty minutes in when it all became a bit of a blur, I sort of lost track of who people were & what they were trying to do not because Dinoshark is complicated but because I was just so bored that my eyes glazed over & I went into autopilot watching what was happening but not really taking it in. Terrible. Awful. Rubbish. Crap. Take your pick, I really don’t have anything positive to say about this total waste of time.
The CGI computer effects are terrible, I mean they are really bad with shots of the Dinoshark leaping out of the Ocean coming across as funny, the attack scenes are some of the worse around with poorly edited shots of people splashing around on the surface & the awful CGI Dinoshark attacking from beneath. There’s a few gory moments like a woman bitten in half lying on a beach, a decapitated head & some blood splatter but nothing overly excessive. There’s no build-up to the attack scenes, there’s no tension or attempt at suspense either, everything that made Jaws the classic it is is totally absent from the awful Dinoshark. This is just rank rubbish, even at 85 minutes long Dinoshark feels like it lasts for two days & is incredibly boring & predictable.
The IMDb says that Dinoshark had a budget of about $2,000,000 which sounds like complete bull to me, how can a film with a fairly decent budget be as rank awful in every way as this? Filmed in Mexico the locations are nice enough I suppose but it does tend to look like a holiday program at times more interested in showing of the sunny settings than anything else. The acting is awful, leading lady Iva Harsperger in particular is terrible. Producer Roger Corman turns up in a small role as a scientist.
Dinoshark is a really awful Sy-Fy Channel creature feature, it’s bottom of the barrel stuff from start to finish. Maybe I have just had my fill of them but I found Dinoshark to be even more predictable, tedious & crappy than usual. Definitely one to avoid. Even if it’s on television for free go & do something fun instead, like the ironing.
