This Geek in Netflix: Shark Attack 3: Megalodon

I’m full of roiling hate, oceans of roiling hate containing gigantic sharks with teeth bigger than my rather immense forehead—which is appropriate, given the movie that Matt Kelly suggested I watch this week.

Shark Attack 3: Megalodon is a frightening example of what can happen when your sound guy runs amok with his dubbing.  I fear for my safety, I fear for the safety of my never-to-be-existent children, that one day they may find themselves unable to speak, only able to laugh like assholes whenever someone of a different race speaks to them.

Directed by David Worth (Lady Dragon, Lady Dragon II), written by the duo who brought you the previous two Shark Attack movies (Scott Devine and William Hooke), this steaming pile of krill was released straight to video in 2002, allowing it to bypass the average person’s radar (lucky, lucky average person).

What was the average person missing?  Actors John Barrowman (Torchwood’s Captain Jack Harkness), Jenny McShane (um…), and Ryan Cutrona (24’s Admiral John Smith and Mad Men’s Gene Hoftstadt) doing battle with a giant shark.  Sounds pretty amazing, right?  We get somebody to zap in a torpedo-rigged TARDIS right into the belly of the beast, BOOM, no problem.

Well, that’s not what happens.  So much for your connections, Barrowman.

This feast of a film opens with a brief, barely related, and completely unnecessary prologue where a diver for Apex Communications falls prey to a drive-by sharking.  What this bit of background establishes for us is two things: 1) there’s a shark 2) while the movie may have been released in 2002, it was clearly shot in the 1970s.

Moving past that near-useless opening, we are introduced to Colima, Mexico’s Playa Del Rey Resort, manned and visited by robotic beings programmed with an unendingly creepy laugh track.  These robots, should they be of a feminine appearance, do not have the capacity of language and only communicate with their brethren with various combinations of moans, cooing, and sounds of surprise.  As for the males, the standard issue models are able to form simple sentences regarding their female counterparts, each sentence punctuated by mechanical laughter.

Unfortunately for these robots, a robot-eating shark has decided to spent some time at the resort’s beaches and soak up some rays and munch on some communications cable—you know, typical shark activities.

Unfortunately for this shark, Captain Jack Harkness is on the case.

Wait, what?  Not Harkness???  What, just some douche named Ben and a paleontologist who could only pass for Laura Dern on account on blondness?  Fuck this movie.

Not-Harkness (Barrowman) and Not-Dern (McShane) team up with some aging ex-Navy guy (Cutrona) and flounce around Colima ogling the scads of bare breasts while uncovering shark-hiding conspiracies set in place by heads of greedy corporations.

What’s the conspiracy?, I will pretend you cared enough to ask.  Apex Communications is laying down miles and miles of communications cable underwater with the hope of wrangling billions of dollars from an international market, but there’s a problem… the cables emit such electricity that they’re waking up dinosaur sharks.

Okay, not “dinosaur sharks” like in ScyFy’s Dinoshark, but really big, supposedly extinct sharks called megalodons.  And these megalodons are attacking the shit out of anyone who happens to be in the area when they stroll down the cable route.  Yes, attacking the shit out of them.  It’s part of the circle of life, just accept it.

Apex has learned about this side effect of their cables and, instead of doing something like taking care of the problem, they’ve decided to just keep on with it and either someone else will kill the sharks or they’ll eventually run out of customers.  Either or.

With all of this asinine stupidity in place, there are four very redeeming parts of this movie.

1. A baby Megalodon decides to grab the rope of a helpless paraglider and slowly drags her kicking and screaming into the ocean where it can chomp her to little bits.

2. Caught in the midst of a ship cabin panty raid, Not-Dern pumps a round of lead directly into the thieving baby Megalodon’s mouth.  Immediately before this moment, Not-Harkness is seen whacking the shark’s nose with a baseball bat, screaming “Die, die, die!!”

3. After wrapping up their shark-assassination plan, the charming and suave Not-Harkness says, “I’m really wired.  What do you say that I take you home and eat your pussy?”

4. Mama Megalodon wakes up and starts eating boats.  Please see the pictures below, as words cannot possibly wrap around the concept of how awesome this is.

In sum, this movie isn’t great.  The first three-quarters of an hour is pretty tedious and entirely worth skipping, but once those forty-five minutes pass, even Disney can’t generate this kind of movie magic.  So if you’re feeling like sharking it up tonight and getting your Megalodon on, sink your hundreds of pointy teeth into this baby on Netflix on Demand.