‘Mountain Shark’ VOD Review
Stars: Stephen Samson, Angela Wilding, Stephen Staley, Andy McQuaker, Ema Ekaete, Julia Quayle, Emily Felicia Moore | Written by Ken Daly | Directed by Greg AK
Mountain Shark opens with a couple wandering along a path in the hills when they stumble across a body with a small bloodstain on it. The only clues as to what happened are a shark’s tooth and a strange metal device on the corpse. That’s enough to send them running, although once we see the CGI fin slicing through the ground, we know they’re doomed.
That is both an exciting and problematic development for Dr. Eric Nesbitt (Stephen Samson; Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Karma Coma) and Major Jennifer Hawkes (Angela Wilding). Exciting in that the creature they created is still alive, problematic in the fact that it’s out of control and needs to be killed without compromising the project’s secrecy. The solution is to bring in what are supposed to be highly trained soldiers, but not tell them what they’re looking for, I guess if they can’t find it, they can’t talk about it. But if they can’t find it, they can’t kill it either, can they?
In any case, Walker (Stephen Staley; Cinderella’s Revenge, Amityville Scarecrow 2) and his team, Winters (Andy McQuaker; Penitence, The Art of Knowing), Makinson (Ema Ekaete; Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2, Tell No Lies), Brooks (Julia Quayle; Three Blind Mice, Halloween Massacre), and Reid (Emily Felicia Moore; Snap Shot, Save Me From Love) are sent to the deserted base, which looks more like a country inn, that serves as Nesbitt and Hawkes headquarters. They’re told that their mission is to track down a missing smart weapon and, presumably, not die horribly in the process.
Mountain Shark is the first film from director Greg AK, but writer Ken Daly has several scripts to his credit, including Spiders on a Plane and Krampus: The Return. Not that it really takes much experience, or talent, to come up with a generic product, and it does feel more like something from an assembly line than an actual film, like this.
First you take the creature from The Outer Limits episode The Invisible Enemy, or any of its knockoffs like Sand Sharks, Snow Shark, Avalanche Sharks, etc. Then drop it in the hills, not mountains, of England and have a small group of extremely unconvincing military personnel wander aimlessly around trying to find it.
How unconvincing is this squad of heroes? They are wearing camo, I’ll give them that. But most of them are also wearing sneakers rather than boots, their tents are bright red and look like they came from Walmart or its British equivalent, and they seem to have no concept of discipline. Also, while it’s not strictly a military thing, the body bags Winters has with him look like clear plastic wrap rather than the black, zippered body bags we’re used to.
As bad as that is, when they finally find the damn thing, or rather it finds them, they fire a few shots before literally throwing their weapons down and running all the way back to base. And despite all the hiking we’ve seen them do, it seems to be just a few minutes away, close enough that the shark, which we’ve seen move damn fast when it wants to, can’t catch them even though a wounded hiker slows them down.
The film tries to pass itself off on IMDB as a horror comedy, but there’s nothing about the film that’s actually funny, intentionally or otherwise. It’s just the same kind of slapped-together, poorly made film producer Louisa Warren (Cannibal Cabin, Conjuring the Plastic Surgeon 2) and ChampDog Films have been grinding out for the past eight years.
Maybe if the script had come up with an eccentric and original idea like Trailer Park Shark, it might have been amusing. Or if it intentionally exaggerated the problems with films like these, Mountain Shark might have worked as a spoof and gotten some laughs. But it doesn’t, even the cheaply rendered CGI doesn’t hit the “so bad it’s funny” level, it just looks bad.
Can I say anything positive about Mountain Shark? Well, it isn’t the worst film Warren has been involved with, and that’s some damn faint praise, but that’s about it. It’s neither funny nor scary, it just dully plods along to an ending that’s so predictable you’ll swear you’ve seen it before, and you’ll be right.
*½ 1.5/5
Mountain Shark is now available on various digital platforms.
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