Raging Sharks: At least it starts and ends with aliens...

Another reason I never became an oceanographer...
Raging Sharks has an impressive list of names that caught my attention almost as much as the promise of shark footage. The train wreck career that Vanessa Angel has sucked me in with an inexorable force that would not be denied. Add to that Corin Nemec, formerly of Stargate SG-1, and Corbin Bernsen, the stern and disapproving father on Psych, and I was hooked. Todd Jensen puts in a very good performance as a total jerk who kicks a lot of ass, and just makes you beg for him to become shark bait. He's been in a lot of movies I've been watching lately, and I have to give him props for diversity.

The movie starts off with aliens, which is cool. A part of their ship ends up in the Bermuda Triangle, and casts off an eerie orange glow, and also has little orange granules inside that the local shark population goes nuts over. Anyone unlucky enough to dive in the area gets chomped on with extreme prejudice.

Naturally there's a lab at the bottom of the ocean nearby, although I'm not quite clear how they got it there without disrupting the sharks. I think we're supposed to assume the orange stuff doesn't start making the sharks nuts until after the lab is all set up, and a storm is coming in. After an attack, plans are made to get everyone out of the lab and to shut the whole project down, which is a side plot that doesn't keep my interest. There's yet another side plot about the husband and wife scientist team (Angel and Nemic) wondering about the fate of their marriage while they study the ocean. Boring, but not too distracting since they quickly get separated.

Corbin Bernsen arrives on the scene in a sub to save the day, and to deliver Todd Jensen's character so he can start being an ass about the accident and threatening to arrest Nemic and shut the lab down. Somewhere along the line they realize the sub isn't equipped to evacuate an undersea lab, so Nemic and Jensen venture through the shark infested water to get stuck in the lab again with everyone else.

There's a lot of side characters of interest, a lot of banter, and a lot of sharks. They make a point of saying that there's so many different species in the same area that it's amazing, but we only see great whites as far as I remember. Not a bad thing for me, but I thought it was a waste to mention it if you're not going to show it. The side plots start getting all muddled, but at least towards the end we get some good fight sequences, and more sharks. Plus, at the end of all the ludicrousness, we get more aliens!

There's not much noteworthy about this film, other than the weird alien twist. If you're squeamish about shark attacks, you won't be able to get through the onslaught. If you're scientific, you'll be mortally offended at someone surviving an undersea explosion less than a meter from where they're hiding. But if you've got a sense of humor about bad movies, you'll giggle through a good deal of this and just be entertained by the end of it, like I was!