Wayfarer's League

Last month was the first gathering of the Crap Film Club! And the first film we watched was “5-Headed Shark Attack!” What can I say about the film that you couldn’t probably guess from simply reading the title? Well, before I start the review proper, let’s start with a quick synopsis of the film.

It’s set in Puerto Rico and opens in typical horror movie fashion with a group of unnamed meat bags getting eaten by the titular 5-headed shark, though at this point in the film it has only 4 heads. Don’t worry, we’ll get to that. It then cuts to two detectives… who have names… everyone in this film is so forgettable that I can’t for the life of me remember what they are. We’ll just call them Boy Detective and Girl Detective. Anyway, Boy and Girl Detective find that one of the people eaten at the beginning of the film had taken a picture of the shark with 4 heads. So they go to the local aquarium to see if a 4-headed shark could exist. The expert they see is a professor of marine biology and is teaching a group of 5 student volunteers about why polluting the oceans and seas is bad for the life that inhabits them. She along with the director of the aquarium look at the photo of the 4-headed shark and both decided that the shark could be real, and they needed to find and catch it so they can study it. The rest of the film is made up of the group from the aquarium along with the detectives trying to catch the shark, and the shark killing people off. The group get the help of the professor’s ex-boyfriend who’s an ex-shark hunter and now does fish-seeing tours for the aquarium. Half-way through the film they decide the shark is too dangerous to try and catch, and so go on the hunt. In the end, they kill it by blowing it up with dynamite in the worst and most predictable ending ever.

If it seemed like I rushed through that recap, it’s because the film is so poorly paced and everything rushes by so quickly that it’s all a blur of bad acting and even worse CGI. The film gives you no time to take in any information. It just goes from one info dump to another with no time in-between. And if it’s not dumping exposition on you, then it’s showing one of the film’s poorly paced fights with the giant CGI shark.

Speaking of the CGI shark, it’s bad like everything else in this film. I’ve seen more realistic looking sharks in the bath toy section of my local supermarket. And with the way the film is edited, some of the scenes with the shark physically hurt my eyes.

For 1 hour and 10 minutes of this 1.5 hour film, the shark has 4-heads. It seems to grow a 5th out of nowhere when the second protagonist gets eaten by it.

I could not for the life of me work out why this is, but the leading theory is that during production whoever was making this film simply forgot to add a 5th until half-way through production and there was no time or money to go back and change it.

Now, let’s finish up by talking about the acting because -oh boy- the acting in this film is bad. No one talks like a normal person. Everyone either talks in exposition that we either already know or that we can see with our eyes, or they talk in these strange short back-and-forth, one-liner filled conversations that I think are meant to be funny(?) but just come across as stiff and painful to watch. Most of the character relationships are told to us rather than shown, and relationships will change from scene-to-scene, or sometimes within the same scene. Characters will whiplash from liking each other to distrust, to contempt, with no regard for any continuity. Two characters will hate each other in one scene and be friends in the next. This all leads to the final scene where the main marine biologist lady gets engaged to her ex with no explanation or rebuilding of their relationship throughout the rest of the film. It’s just, “Hey! We should get married!” “Ok!” Then roll credits.

It’s maddening. There’s no growth or character arcs, everyone ends the film in pretty much the same place they started at except for those lucky characters that get eaten by the shark.

In conclusion, 5-Headed Shark Attack is the worst film I’ve ever seen. It’s poorly acted, the CGI sucks, the pacing is all over the place, the plot is nonsensical. It’s just bad. The words that left my mouth as the credits rolled were, “I think I’ve had a stroke as I don’t know what just happened,” and I think that’s the only good thing I have to say about this film. When it’s all over you won’t remember what happened because it feels like you’ve and a stroke and you black out or as one of the poor souls who watched along with me commented, “It was like a bad acid trip”.

Final score (out of 10): A bad acid trip

If you would like to join us for the next crap movie night, then sign-up to the event on our events page and come and join the pain. It’s a lot of fun despite the awful film being watched. This month’s will be the film “Cowgirls VS Pterodactyls” on the 24th. It sounds great….?