619. Sand Sharks (2011)

Starring: Corin Nemec, Brooke Hogan, Vanessa Evigan

Director: Mark Atkins

Running Time: 86 mins

Sand Sharks is an American film about a beachside town, hosting the spring break party of a lifetime, that is terrorised by a platoon of sharks that swim in the sand.

Well, despite this being yet another addition to the long list of atrocious shark B-movies, I wasn’t as appalled as I had expected. Sure, the performances are largely poor, the story is dumb and totally predictable, and the visual effects are typically terrible, but it’s impressively imaginative and comedic enough to prevent you from grinding your teeth to sawdust.

However, let’s start with the feature of these sort of films that is always terrible: the CGI. Obviously, on such a low budget, you expect a poor showing of visual effects, however this is really terrible. While Jurassic Shark was probably the worst thing I’ve ever seen, the poor CGI in this film make films like Sharknado look like Star Wars.

And that’s just the animation of the sharks swimming in the sand, don’t even get me started on the animated blood and gore in this film, because that really takes the biscuit for some of the most disappointing CG I’ve ever seen.

Away from that, the story was just terrible. It’s set in a situation which is yet another excuse to just show girls in their bikinis, and there’s very little thought gone into the mystery of it all. Of course, it’s a deliberately dumb idea, but even a little bit of thought or intrigue in the story would have actually brought a great deal of excitement into something that was easily predictable.

Also, the amount of Jaws references is completely ridiculous. Ranging from the subtle to the blatant, there aren’t only little one-liners that take the mick out of the Spielberg classic, but even the timing and structure of the first part of the film is almost identical to that of Jaws.

In terms of the performances, they were terrible as usual. It almost felt like just another student film, with very little acting talent really there, although I was surprised by a couple of characters, whose actors actually gave decent performances (better than your average shark film).

The only positive I can draw from this is that it is very imaginative. Sharks that swim in the sand is completely preposterous and too idiotic an idea to even enjoy, but the idiocy with which this is all presented is good fun, and the more light-hearted nature of the whole thing does prevent from being horribly annoying, so that’s why it gets a 2.7.