Cynical Cinema

When I picked up “Raging Sharks” from the video store, I thought I was in for a real bad-movie treat in the afternoon.  And I was partly right.  As far as B-grade, poorly filmed monster movies go, however, there are dozens that leap to mind right away that are far more entertaining than this one.  Don’t get me wrong - all the proper plot elements are there to make this one a classic of the bad movies.  The sharks which are, for some reason, filled with “rage” and who attack everyone in sight.  The tough-as-nails marine submarine captain.  The evil bad guy who shows up and does evil-bad-guy things for no apparent reason, or at least for no good, explainable reason.  The sad, pathetic, porn-level acting from the main characters.  The three female stars who are clearly chosen for their fat puffy lips more than for any other reason.  And, of course, the aliens.  There are aliens.  Put these things together, and you should have a movie bad enough to laugh at all the way through.

 But the worst thing a film like this can do is to bore you.  It must be consistently ridiculous, and contantly awful, and the action should never stop sucking.  However, this is where Raging Sharks goes wrong.  Not that there are moments where it is good, but rather there are moments where nothing is happening at all.  Which means there are stretches of twenty minutes where you have nothing to watch except horrible acting.  Which is funny for three minutes, but then you want to see stupid shark scenes and badly-shot explosions and inexplicable alien visits.  So you’re almost asleep when the next idiotic shark scene takes place.

 The sharks are the best part of this film, but they play a very small role, considering they are the title characters.  You see, they attack people, but on a low budget that means that all you get to see is a shark mouth opening really fast, water splashing, and red dye poured into the water, followed by shots of disembodied hands floating to the bottom.  In fact, this film is SO low-budget that the same exact shark shots are used in nearly every shark attack.  And the best part - the sharks ROAR.  Like lions.  In fact, I am almost positive they took the audio of the lions roaring in kids movies like Madagascar and The Wild, and put it into their soundtrack where they believed the sharks should be roaring.  

 The movie does not even wait to reveal the involvement of aliens.  The very first shot in this film is on of two alien spacecraft smashing into one another, dislodging some sort of fuel cell that careens into the ocean on Earth (of course it hits a boat on the way down).  The aliens do not appear again until the very end of the film, and even then they are just there.  They don’t do anything.  They just come to get their fuel cell back.  The end.  In the meantime, the three lead actresses compete for the puffy-lips crown.  Vanessa Angel, who already had very puffy lips in the excellent film Kingpin, seems to have overdosed on collagen since then, and now has a what looks to be a fat guy’s pink ass on her face.  Elise Muller and Simona Levin also provide some full-lipped entertainment, which is a little funnier because it clearly makes them incapable of pronouncing most words properly.

The main action takes place on an underwater research station (as it always does in cheesy shark movies), a station apparently situated about eleven feet from the surface, as scuba divers are able to get in and out.  A bonkers premise like this one promises way more campy idiocy than this movie delivers, and that is a real shame.  Aliens, cruddy shark attacks, pointless bad guys and horrible poofy-lipped acting all spell camptastic, but this movie can’t even do that right.  This film is a turd.