Look out! It's a floating triangle moving very, very slowly towards you!

Blue Demon is yet another entry into the “demonized shark” movie category. A secret lab funded by the government is researching ways to control sharks to do their bidding. The scientists believe they are doing work to benefit mankind, but unbeknownst to them the government has other plans. Plus, there’s someone hijacking their project with deadly results. dun, dun, dun, dun!

That’s about as serious as the movie gets, and I was so very happy to sit and waste an hour and a half of my time on it. It has a lot of goofy extras to it to provide much needed humor, and doesn’t go for the gore factor. This is a funny, good time movie with a decent cast to back it up.

I’ve made it clear that I think Dedee Pfeiffer is very difficult to tolerate onscreen for more than a few minutes at a time. She’s twitchy. She’s fidgety. I think they keep messing with her dosage. But in the very cheesy, gloriously ludicrous Blue Demon, she fits wonderfully! Her cutesy act isn’t nauseating. Her overly-caffeinated persona makes sense as a quirky scientist who’s just a bit too smart to speak with us ‘regular people’, let alone have more than basic social skills. Plus, she’s balanced out very nicely by her co-star, Randall Batinkoff, who plays her long suffering, potentially ex-husband. He’s the anchor that lets your eyes focus while she vibrates and hums herself practically into another dimension.

The rest of the cast all fit this odd little movie just perfectly. We have Josh Hammond playing a weird little lab assistant named Avery that you keep expecting to start talking about surfing, but plays with the computers instead. There’s also Danny Woodburn who plays the uptight, possibly corrupt, boss to our lab gurus, Lawrence Van Allen. He easily steals every scene he is in, and it’s not because he can’t help but stand out because he’s so much shorter. He’s got remarkable screen presence, and makes his character the most believable of the lot as he yanks food out of their hands because they’re not paying attention to him, and alternates between making the lab gurus lives hell, and needing an antacid to deal with them.

Then there’s our big, bad, evil military character, played by Jeff Fahey. He plays a character named, of all things, General Remora. Right there you know for a fact this movie is not taking itself seriously, which is why I love it so morbidly. Jeff Fahey plays it to the hilt, clenching cigars, spitting out orders, seething with righteous indignation when he’s questioned. He’s out to create a military weapon, gosh darn it, not out for a day at the beach!

But the cast is just the icing on the cake of Blue Demon. The “short bus” special effects are a riot, and almost painfully bad. I swear to god the shark fins in the water scenes are just waterproof cardboard cutouts painted black and on the slowest motor they could find. When people are frantically trying to get out of their way, I checked my watch several times just to make sure I hadn’t fallen into some kind of slow moving time warp. In all of those scenes I could have gotten up and microwaved another bag of popcorn and not missed a thing.

The little bit of CGI they went for is actually pretty good. They give the sharks expressions, and have them zip back and forth (not unlike the frenetic pace of Ms. Pfeiffer). Yes, it’s so obviously blue screen out of the water it’s laughable, but it just adds to the cheese factor, so I forgive.

If you’re tired of shark movies that flash way too much chomped flesh at you, Blue Demon will be a pleasant respite. If you’re also tired of movies taking themselves too seriously, especially when they should know better, this will be a breath of fresh air. And if you’ve been given a headache trying to keep up with Dedee in other movies, I think you’ll be as shocked as I was at how tolerable, and even likable, she is in Blue Demon.

With Discovery Channel airing Shark Week, Blue Demon should be on your watch list to help get over all that darn reality and education they insist on adding to their quest for ratings. It also has the added bonus of plenty of giggle factor! This is a Queen Of Cheese “must see”, or at least “must watch once, and wonder what the heck is wrong with that Queen Of Cheese to think this is watchable…”. Enjoy!

Tags: b-movie, Blue Demon, cheese, creature feature, Danny Woodburn, Dedee Pfeiffer, giggle factor, Jeff Fahey, Josh Hammond, movie review, Randall Batinkoff, shark attack movie, Shark Week

Cool shark graphics, horrible English dubs, and cheesy fun!

There’s just something about a shark attack movie I can’t resist. When it’s a German made flick with horrible English dubs, that just melts the cheese into a bubbly fondue.

In this case we have Shark Attack In The Mediterranean. A man, Sven Hanson, is trying to keep his life together after losing his wife in what we’re told is a horrific shark attack. His teenage daughter is into jet skies and stealing people’s boyfriends (even though she does it so sweetly, and the current girlfriend is such a snot you can hardly blame the guy), and rolling her eyes at her father. His best friend is head of the local police force, with a wife wasting away from cancer. Our hero flies a helicopter, and his latest passenger happens to be an attractive marine biologist, Julia Bennett, arriving on the island to help with cancer studies involving lots and lots of sharks. We now have our basic setup of conflict.

Right off the bat we get a young girl (horribly dubbed with a voice too young to fit the actress) setting the stage by telling a tale of tragic love that ends at the bottom of the ocean. The girl is with her family, all tourists in this Mediterranean paradise who wanted to cage dive with sharks. Well, the sharks aren’t biting, so the captain of the boat decides to drag the cage, with the tourists still inside, along the bottom to a more dangerous spot where sharks are guaranteed. The cage gets caught on the bottom, the rope breaks, one of the tourists cuts their hand, and they’re suddenly surrounded by an awesome display of fluid shark graphics. Even knowing it’s got to be fake, it really looks cool, and eerily realistic, including sharks biting at the cage trying to catch a nibble of fingers and other parts.

So our pilot and his passenger come along in the nick of time to save the day. It gives us a chance to see that they have a lot in common, and to make it clear they’re going to be love interests. We also get a chance to see our hero be an over-protective father when he sees that his daughter is part of the crew of the ship in such dire straits. Arguments ensue, we get some melodrama over the father wanting to move back to Germany and the daughter not wanting to go, and the police friend stepping in with his sick wife to talk about living every moment instead of living in the past. Good stuff, and probably very well acted, despite what the voice actors would have you believe.

But the meat of the story is about a megalodon. It’s entirely unbelievable how a renegade scientist came into possession of a megalodon, although believable that it then escaped. However, the ensuing graphics are so very cool I can forgive all of this movie’s plot holes. You really need to watch the movie so you can hear first hand all of the flawed science, but more to see the CGI of the megalodon as it cruises the Mediterranean. There’s a scene where the hero is basically fishing for it with his helicopter, and the megalodon grabs a hold of the lure. We get several minutes of slick, believable underwater scenes of the shark rolling and thrashing, putting the folks at Discovery Channel to shame.

There’s also plenty of humor throughout Shark Attack In The Mediterranean, provided both by the ludicrous storyline and by secondary characters that are riotously exaggerated. Humor is what’s missing from a lot of B-movies lately, and this was like a breath of fresh air for me. Finally, another movie that doesn’t take itself so seriously, and revels in the cheese!

Shark Attack In The Mediterranean isn’t terribly original, but it’s fun, and has the best shark CGI I have seen. Surprisingly there’s no gore, which made me happier yet. A little blood, a flash of a body, but nothing horrendous trying to gross you out. Basically this is a well done B-movie about a prehistoric shark come to life, and was worth every second of screen time. If you love Shark Attack 3: Megalodon in all of it’s cheesy glory, you’re going to enjoy this movie for all the right reasons!

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, action flick, b-movie, German to English dub, giggle factor, megalodon, Patriq Pinheiro, popcorn munching afternoon, Ralf Moeller, Shark Attack In The Mediterranean, shark attack movie

This cover is awesome! I wish the movie were, too...

Once again the movie industry makes a movie where they can at least say, “We got a Baldwin…”, and it is dear Stephen Baldwin. We’ve had a slide backwards in acting proficiency since The Harpy, and he once again displays one facial expression to encompass all ranges of emotional states, whether it is learning of his father’s death, waking up in a hospital after being attacked by a shark, or realizing his wife has been kidnapped by the stereotypical bad guys. I think we’re also experiencing a slide backwards in physical fitness, because the movie makers are careful to not make us see Stephen Baldwin shirtless, but they can’t keep us from seeing things jiggle around under his shirt when he runs down a street.

The premise of this movie is promisingly ludicrous. People are seeking Marco Polo’s treasure, which is supposed to be under the canals of Venice. Venice begins to have more and more “boat accidents” that result in floating body parts with teeth marks in them. Stephen Baldwin’s character travels to Venice with his wife to identify his father’s body, who is also classified as a “boating accident” despite the teeth marks. When the Italian police refuse to listen to the know-it-all, monotoned American, our hero decides to pick up where his father left off, especially once the bad guys approach him and offer him a schnike-load of cash to help them out in the search.

Turns out that there are lots of sharks in Venice, and they’re big ones, all great whites. Supposedly they were dropped in as babies, and never found their way out to the ocean before they got too big to leave (or died because this isn’t their environment, and the trauma should have killed them). So now Venice has hungry sharks in their canals snacking on divers, and then getting more aggressive and attacking gondolas and people passing on the street. That’s right, people passing on the street. You heard me.

Along the way an Italian cop alternately helps and hinders them based on her own agenda. The bad guys proclaim they need Stephen Baldwin’s character alive to help them, and then send in ninja assassins in the next scene to spray his hotel room with bullets. There are other fight scenes placed throughout, but there’s just not enough shark action to satisfy me. We have to wait too long in between those moments, and then it’s a lot of spliced Discovery Channel footage with some goofy, but fun, CGI, but instead of making it a nice, fluid sequence, they flash back and forth between sets in the movie. I guess they were trying to build suspense, but they just irritated me.

Basically, this is another movie with great potential for cheesy goodness, and it falls short. I don’t know if Stephen Baldwin had a hand in how things played out, but it all ends too goody-goody-gumdrops, and it just doesn’t fit the tone of the movie. I personally think he insists all scripts be rewritten to make him a hero, but also to make sure we have happy endings for all the characters who “come through” in the end. What surprised me in this movie was the violence and the blood, because lately Stephen seemed to steer a wide path clear of them, most likely for personal reasons.

Whatever the case for why Stephen Baldwin “landed” this role, once again he only provides painful comic relief. Maybe he thought acting with Scarlett Johansson’s cute older sister, Vanessa Johansson, would lend him credibility, but he was wrong. I hope Vanessa didn’t think that acting with a Baldwin would help her career out any, either.

For a better, more entertaining, shark movie, go for Deep Blue Sea, or even better, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon. Watch Sharks In Venice once, get over your disappointment, and move on.

Tags: "Not So Original" Movies, action flick, b-movie, shark attack movie, Sharks In Venice, Stephen Baldwin, Vanessa Johansson, Venice