‘Space Sharks’ VOD Review
Stars: Eric Roberts, Carl Crew, Scott Schwartz, Allie Perez, Brinke Stevens, Mel Novak | Written and Directed by Dustin Ferguson
One of the stranger subgenres of horror films to emerge recently is that involving sharks from outer space. Space Sharks is the latest addition, following Iron Sky and its sequel, Sky Sharks and Shark Side of the Moon, among others. Of none of them are nearly as good as the original The Outer Limits episode The Invisible Enemy, but that’s a whole different bucket of chum.
What concerns us now is the commercial spacecraft, The Clairvoyant, returning to Earth with a cargo of alien sea creatures and plant life. That includes what looks like a couple of small sharks with legs and feet. They have visions of generous research grants dancing in the heads of their scientific team. That consists of Dr. Johnson (Eric Roberts; Exceptional Beings, Runaway Train), Dr. Thompson (Carl Crew; Devilreaux, The Forbidden Dimensions) and Dr. Hansen played by Scott Schwartz whose credits include A Christmas Story and The Toy to Raiders of the Living Dead to Café Flesh 2 and playing Agent Big Knob in Booby Trap. Talk about a varied career.
But the only thing in their future is a meteor swarm that damages the ship and forces them to make an emergency landing somewhere in the woods of California. It also somehow results in the sharks drawing to human size and learning to breathe air, walk, and hunt humans like they were auditioning for a reboot of Without Warning.
Writer/director Dustin Ferguson (Cocaine Cougar, Amityville in the Hood) is probably well known, if not well regarded, by regular readers. A large part of the reason for that is his cookie-cutter non-plots where a group of mostly random characters, portrayed by pay-to-play actors show up on screen wander around briefly, and die. Neither they nor their deaths, deaths have any effect on the story. It’s like watching an 80s slasher but without the gory effects.
And Space Sharks does follow that template once the alien organisms arrive on Earth. It’s not the sharks, but plants that are supposed to be triffids, that do much of the killing. Their presence was a nice surprise as the sharks can, and do, make themselves invisible most of the time., briefly appearing to kill someone in a burst of CGI blood.
There’s also Nora (Allie Perez; Amityville Emanuelle, Stokes River Haunting), the only survivor of the crew, who is in pretty good shape considering what she went through. It looks like, with a group of recovering addicts led by their councillor Rochelle (Brinke Stevens; The Slumber Party Massacre, Smart House) on a nature hike standing in for the highly trained mercenaries, she’ll get to rehash Predator in the film’s last half hour. But even that was asking a bit much, as the main plot quickly ends, and we’re given a load of padding to get the film to the seventy-minute mark.
In that time though, Space Sharks does steal a lot from Predator, the cloaking device, the heat vision display, a skinned body hanging upside down from a tree, etc. Unfortunately, apart from some of the shots of the spacecraft and the triffids, most of the effects are better than we usually get in Ferguson’s films but still far from good.
And that might be the best way to sum up Space Sharks as a whole, it is better than much of what we’ve seen from Ferguson. But the lack of solid plotting and subplots about a conspiracy theorist wandering around talking on his phone and another with Mel Novak (Game of Death, An Hour to Kill) as Nora’s father that go nowhere keep it from being more than watchable at best.
**½ 2.5/5
Space Sharks is available on an assortment of Digital Platforms via Wild Eye Releasing.
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