Smallscreen Reviews

Review: Dinoshark is epic, Syfy's Roger Corman fish tale airs Sat, March 13

By April MacIntyre Mar 5, 2010, 16:06 GMT

Dinoshark! Watch it! Fun stuff Courtesy of SyFy Movies

Syfy has done a very clever thing; it has tapped into the great, financially strapped, not going out anywhere fancy stay-at-home masses and served up the kind of great B-films our parents and grandparents enjoyed in their youth.

Films like The Blob, Creature with the Atom Brain, The Godzilla films, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, The Fly and more.  These fun films, laced with implausible plots, brilliant poster art and laughable dialogue demanded that you show up ready to suspend disbelief, prepare for a scare and always left the audience entertained.

Syfy network and B-movie king Roger Corman have teamed up for yet another completely preposterous fish tale that borrows heavily from Jaws, Agatha Christie and even The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. 

Well, at least the Mexican-American standoff parts that pit the buffoonish, corrupt "we don't need no stinkin' badges" Mexican search and rescue hombres against our valiant American to the rescue: the frustrated pleasure boat captain: Trace McGraw (Eric Balfour).

Welcome to Dinoshark. This fun film airs on Syfy Saturday night, March 13.

“Little Shop of Horrors” auteur Roger Corman and Julie Corman produced this film, and the two seized on the current climactic phenomenon of retracting glacier ice shelves to cook up an ultimate "what if?" tale underlined by the theme of "you did this to planet Earth, here's your payback" as a miraculously defrosted Plesiosaur-meets-shark tadpole wiggles out of his icy encasement and grows and grows.

And grows some more.

Our film opens off the coast of Alaska, as a lone sailor (mistake number one) decides to dive in frigid water to see if something is up with the hull of his boat  (mistake number two)  as he sees the minor damage to the side of his submerged sloop, he feels a large swooshing presence push him underwater, and decides to look around and investigate (mistake number three). 

Long story short, our CGI shark does a victory leap after devouring him whole (including the boats GPS marker that looks like a stick of dynamite) in a nanosecond. 

The shark in this film likes to do these showy Flipper-esque leaps after it attacks, by the way.

This film is full of vivid bloody kill scenes and quick shots of heads, entrails and parts, so for youngsters, you may want them out of the room.  Special effects' junkies will love all these touches, especially when the prosthetic prop shark head pops out of water mouth wide open and quickly yanks a victim under.  Also appreciated was the great mawing bass growl that the shark makes as he motors through the water heading for his vctims.

Our Alaskan Dinoshark heads south to warmer waters and winds up in Puerto Vallarta's "Paradise Village" ready to rumble.  Enter our film’s main human attraction, Trace McGraw,  the bemused Annapolis drop-out who is a self-described Navy brat returning to his childhood home of the Village.  We meet his circle of affable bar friends glad to see their favorite Gringo return to the scene. 

Trace meets Princeton graduate and girl's water volleyball team coach Carol Brubaker (Iva Haspberger) a Croatian leggy lovely who totally passes for a California blond bombshell.  This beauty also studies marine ecosystems when she is not fending off the unwanted advances of creepy dirty old man Mike who talks her into having her snarky volleyball girls hold an exhibition in a canal that leads out to open water.

Beauty and brains Carol is on to the Dinoshark, and seeks out her professor and mentor, Dr. Reeves (Roger Corman), who in one hilarious scene that I am still processing asks the Mariachis performing at his party to “turn the volume down” as his cougar wife struggles to comprehend what a fellow scientist peer of Reeves is nattering on about.   Did I mention it was acoustic Mariachi music, not Slayer?

The film's villain pushes the two unlikely paramours closer together with each mysterious death, as they piece together what is lurking in their coastal idyll. Trace's scenes with the Mexican search and rescue team (after his Mexican buddy with the badge is eaten) are hilariously over the top. Think Al Pacino's Cuban accent in Scarface times ten.

We wouldn't want it any other way.