Canadian Shark
Jurassic Shark (2012): 3 out of 10: There are some films where the title is more of a promise than the movie itself. Jurassic Shark is one of those films. A prehistoric shark is released into a lake after some questionable science and even more questionable filmmaking, leaving various groups of unlucky people stranded on an island where they must avoid being eaten, murdered, or forced to walk through the woods for another ten minutes. With RiffTrax along for the ride, the film becomes marginally more survivable, though it is worth noting that “more survivable” is not the same thing as “good,” “watchable,” or “something you should do to yourself without adult supervision.”
The Good
Let us be fair right out of the gate: Jurassic Shark has a cute little stinger at the end, which makes one wonder why any of that energy, humor, or basic understanding of entertainment was not sprinkled more liberally across the previous hour and change. Still, beggars and choosers. When a movie has spent most of its running time asking you to watch people wander around the woods as if they are trying to find the Blair Witch’s less interesting cousin, a competent ending gag feels like discovering a working ice cream machine at a McDonalds.
There are also a lot of attractive women in bikinis for significant stretches of time. This is not exactly sophisticated praise, but we are not dealing with sophisticated cinema here. At this level of filmmaking, one takes production value where one can get it, and occasionally that production value comes in the form of people wearing beachwear near a body of water. Unlike certain other no-budget shark films I could name…and will, repeatedly…Jurassic Shark at least understands that sharks and water have a historical relationship.
The acting is also not entirely hopeless. That sounds like faint praise because it is, but in the world of micro-budget shark attack cinema, being able to consistently portray the same character from one scene to the next is practically a Best Supporting Actress campaign. There are performers here who appear to understand who they are supposed to be, what emotion they are meant to be approximating, and what scene they are technically in. Again, we are grading on the sort of curve normally reserved for kindergarten refrigerator art, but credit where credit is due.
Speaking of art, Jurassic Shark also has one genuinely amusing narrative wrinkle involving a group of art thieves. I am not saying this makes sense. I am not saying it is well-developed. I am not even saying it belongs in the same film as a prehistoric lake shark. But as a concept, “psychotic art thieves trapped on shark island” is at least something. It is an idea. At this level, having an idea is practically an artistic manifesto.
And, because it must be said, Jurassic Shark is better than Ouija Shark. This is not a compliment so much as a geological survey of the bottom of the barrel, but the distinction matters. The women are more attractive; the shark looks vaguely more like something intended to be a shark, and the movie takes place on an actual body of water. These may seem like obvious minimum requirements for a shark movie, but after Ouija Shark (or the slightly better Amityville Island for that matter), I no longer take anything for granted. If the shark is wet, we are already ahead of the game.
The Bad
The problem with Jurassic Shark is that once you get past the title, the bikinis, and the novelty of a shark movie that remembered to include water, there is not a great deal of movie here. There is a prehistoric shark, yes. There is an island, allegedly. There are people who need to get from one part of the island to another part of the island. And then there is walking. So much walking. Endless walking. Walking through trees. Walking down paths. Walking in groups. Walking while discussing the plot. Walking while failing to advance the plot. Walking as if the filmmakers were being paid by the footstep.
Padding is one of the great enemies of low-budget cinema. A good cheap movie understands its limitations and moves quickly enough that you do not have time to inventory them. Jurassic Shark does the opposite. It keeps inviting you to stare at its seams. It drags scenes past their natural life span. It cuts back to people trudging through the wilderness with the dramatic urgency of someone looking for a misplaced flip-flop. At some point, you stop wondering how the characters are going to escape the shark and start wondering how big this goddamn island is supposed to be.
This is especially bizarre because the movie clearly takes place in Canada. I know this because everyone sounds Canadian, including possibly the shark. We also seem to be in summer, because people are in and around the lake without immediately becoming ice sculptures. Anyone familiar with Canadian lakes knows this gives us roughly a two-week seasonal window where entering the water is merely unpleasant instead of a suicide pact with hypothermia. And if this is summer in Ontario or Quebec or wherever, there should be daylight for approximately 75 percent of the day.
So when the movie acts like the characters have to stop, wait overnight, and try again in the morning, one begins to question the basic geography, astronomy, and common sense of the entire production. It is the middle of the day. You have ten more hours of daylight. Walk faster. Or in a straight line. Or in any direction that suggests you understand islands have edges.
The shark itself is also a problem, because eventually the shark has to appear in your shark movie. This is where Jurassic Shark runs into the traditional challenge of no-budget creature features: the creature. The effects look like they were created using a free demo program that came with a thirty-minute timer. The shark does not so much move through the water as get pasted into the general vicinity of water. The attacks have the physical impact of a Roku screensaver.
RiffTrax gets a lot of mileage out of that, naturally, but there is only so much one can do with effects this undercooked. There is bad, there is charmingly bad, and then there is “we had access to software and made choices” bad. Jurassic Shark spends a lot of time in the third category.
The Ugly
Jurassic Shark is not merely cheap. Cheap can be fun. Cheap can be charming. Cheap can have energy, imagination, and a certain reckless enthusiasm that bigger movies often lack. The issue here is that the film is cheap and inert. It has the raw materials for a goofy little bad-movie treat, prehistoric shark, stranded victims, art thieves, bikinis, Canadian summer lake nonsense, but it never turns those pieces into momentum.
The movie’s strangest shared hobby with Ouija Shark is its commitment to wasting time. These films seem convinced that what audiences really want from a shark movie is not shark attacks, panic, suspense, or gore, but transitional hiking footage. I do not need every shark movie to be Jaws. I am not unreasonable. I will meet a movie like Jurassic Shark more than halfway. But the film has to meet me somewhere. Preferably near the water. Preferably with a shark. Or gratuitous nudity… I am easy to please.
Instead, the movie keeps drifting away from its own selling points. The shark is not convincing enough to carry the film. The characters are not developed enough to carry it. The plot is not coherent enough to carry it. The comedy is mostly accidental.
There are examples of this being done correctly. 2014’s Xtinction: Predator X is my go-to example. The special effects are the same in both. Hell, they both have the exact same Free Willy scene. The acting is about the same as well. The difference is in the screenplay. While Jurassic Shark has the gun-toting art thieves, the movie never really knows what to do with them.
In Jurassic Shark, the trio is kidnapped by the gun-toting art thieves. While they do force some people in the lake to retrieve the painting that fell out of their escape rowboat, there is barely any menace… compare this to what I wrote about Xtinction: Predator X: Our trio is then captured by the henchman. The marine is fed to the alligators, the finance is gang raped and the ex wife is tied up and beaten and good lord, what kind of movie is this?
Yeah, that is a difference. Also, one may note that the creature in Xtinction: Predator X is a pliosaur and not a megalodon. Well, the shark in Jurassic Shark is not a Megalodon either, as the screenshots clearly demonstrate. Apparently the filmmaker’s copy of Kidpix Studio Deluxe only came with a generic bull shark model.
And yet, again, it is not the worst zero-budget shark attack movie I have ever seen. That sentence should not comfort anyone involved, but it is true. I would rather sit through Jurassic Shark again than say 12 Days of Terror again. And of course, Ouija Shark still exists, squatting at the bottom of the cinematic ocean like a cursed novelty paperweight. Compared to that, Jurassic Shark looks like Deep Blue Sea. Well, perhaps not Deep Blue Sea. Maybe the loading screen for Deep Blue Sea blu-ray. Even so, progress is progress.
In Conclusion
Jurassic Shark is a terrible movie that has a few accidental virtues: attractive cast members, a slightly better shark than the absolute worst of the genre, an actual aquatic setting, and the occasional performer who appears to have read the script and remembered parts of it. The RiffTrax commentary adds enough jokes to keep the experience from sinking entirely, and the final few minutes of the film are honestly pretty funny.
Jurassic Shark still is a slog. It pads endlessly; (its credits are inexplicable almost fifteen minutes long.) Its effects are dire even by the standards of no-budget Canadian shark cinema, and its understanding of time, geography, daylight, and island travel borders on experimental. This is not good. This is not even good-bad consistently. It is simply lesser-bad, which in this particular ecosystem counts as a slight but measurable achievement.
Recommended only with the RiffTrax commentary. And even then for bad shark movie enthusiasts, and anyone who saw RiffTrax: Ouija Shark and thought, “Surely there must be a version of this where the shark at least gets wet.”
RiffTrax Review
RiffTrax: Jurassic Shark (2022): 8 out of 10: The RiffTrax team, for their part, does what they can. This is not one of those magical cases where the riffing transforms a bad movie into a must-watch experience, but it makes the movie much easier to endure. There are some good shots landed, some serious belly laughs, and by the time the film reaches its last stretch, Mike and the boys seem to find a rhythm. It is the sort of RiffTrax where the commentary is less a bonus feature and more a flotation device.
When the film drags (which is most of the running time) is where the RiffTrax version becomes essential. Without the riffing, Jurassic Shark would be a hard sit. With the riffing, it becomes a tolerable bad-movie watch with a few genuinely funny stretches and a surprisingly decent final push. But even RiffTrax cannot fully disguise the fact that the movie itself often feels like someone had a title, a lake, a few actresses, one shark file on a laptop, and a weekend to put them all together.
