If you’re anything like me, you lay awake at night pondering deeply philosophical questions. Am I the sum of my experiences? If I had chronic amnesia, would I lose all sense of who I am as a person, or would there still be a core sort of self? What could be the worst possible time for a two-headed shark to attack?

I can’t answer the first two questions, but now I can answer the third. No, it’s not during a massive volcano eruption, nor during a meteor shower and, yes, while being the middle of a human centipede and being attacked by a two-headed shark would be really inconvenient, I can say without a doubt that the worst time for a mutant shark attack would be on Opposite Day.

Spring Break at the donkey show is always a mixed bag.

Earlier this year, The Asylum, a production company with a tendency to release low budget movies with similar themes to upcoming blockbusters, released 2-Headed Shark Attack. This, mind you, is the same company that brought us such fine films as Mega Shark v.s. Crocosaurus, #1 Cheerleader Camp, and Snakes on a Train. (Trivia tidbit: their latest, Nazis at the Center of the Earth, is set to release on the 24^th of this month. Premiere party at Jonathan London’s house!)

This must-see film doesn’t only feature a massive two-headed shark, but also features performances by Carmen Electra (Carmen Electra’s Aerobic Striptease), Charlie O’Connell (Sliders’ Colin Mallory), and Brooke Hogan (Mrs. Hulk Hogan’s womb). The cast, I will admit, might be more alarming than the shark.

How do these actors all come together to form the magical film that graces our presence today? So glad you asked—otherwise this article would have ended prematurely, and I hate it when action is halted by someone being premature. In this wild tale of fantasy, Dr. Babish (Electra) and Professor Babish (O’Connell) take a boatload of college kids out on… a boat. What else are you going to carry a boatload of kids on?

As female characters are slowly being established as entities independent of their breasts, the corpse of a mega-mouth shark, a species that is normally consigned to the depths of the ocean with Amy Winehouse begin to surface. This dead fish inconveniences the Babishes and their little army of castaways when it gets stuck in the ship’s propeller and begins to jettison a trail of little bloody bits behind them as they bob along, summoning the two-headed shark right to their lido deck.

Angry at not being allowed into the sunbathing area due to inappropriate attire, the mutant shark rams the side of the vessel, causing the hull to crack and water to seep in. It is at this time that Opposite Day is announced. Talk about timing, right?

This is the best shot in the movie and my new desktop wallpaper.

How to handle Opposite Day during a shark attack:

Have the captain of the ship loudly announce how the boat is sinking, the radio is broken, and everyone is, essentially, fucked. Following that, evacuate the ship to a nearby island with well-kept buildings, groomed pathways, and the occasional electrical outlet. While wandering these fenced paths, make sure everyone loudly complains about how the island has no sign of recent human life and that there might be cannibals.

While the ship starts to sink, insert a montage of Carmen Electra doing vaguely erotic poses as she sunbathes in order to keep the feeling of action and intensity at its highest peak. Oh, wait, that’s when it’s Opposite Day for the director! I’m going to insert awkward laughter here and get back to the movie.

We quickly learn that the shark is not subject to the laws of Opposite Day or physics—while the kids roam the island getting into nonsensical conversations with emotional outbursts that make very little sense, the twenty-foot long shark begins to slam its body into the island, causing quakes to rock the several mile wide island as pieces begin to fall off and cracks show on the surface.

What will they do?! They can’t go into the water because there’s a two-headed shark, and they can’t stay on the island because it’s falling to pieces due to the shark’s amorous affections! It’s the ultimate catch-22! The horror, the tension, the… oh, fuck it, I can’t keep this fake interest up.

I’d like to go more into this movie, about how the remaining few survivors at the end of the film somehow set a t-shirt hanging out of a gas can on fire with a Zippo… while underwater, or about how the anchored – and supposedly sinking— ship constantly varies its distance from the island. One hundred feet, two miles, what’s the difference when a boat race is going on?

But what I’d really like to talk about is how this movie consistently fails to keep the most basic levels of realism. How can a girl on one side of the island see what’s going on on the other side of the island? How can a group of people on the shore see a shark swimming underwater two miles away? How can a speedboat race along for thirty seconds, only to wind up five feet from its starting point? How could this movie have passed anyone’s quality control?

FUCK.

I hate this movie. I’m all about B-movies, I really am. Nazis under the earth? Hell, yes. A car that runs solely on human blood? Definitely. Sharks with scorpion tails and prehensile tongues? If I’m watching porn, sure.

But I can’t do this. I need the laws of physics to be obeyed, especially if biology is being so delightfully disregarded. This movie lives on others’ suffering and a complete disregard of the natural order of things, like eyeline matching and reality. Carmen Electra, a doctor?? Who would believe that? The only redeeming thing in this movie is the opening scene. They blew their sharky load in the first three minutes.

Totally embarrassed about premature load blowing.

I want to shoot someone. I want to find out which exact people are responsible for this mess and I want to take away whatever guild cards they may have and ship them out to Ohio where they can live as corn farmers and won’t be able to do any more harm.

So if you feel like being horribly disappointed, if you feel like screaming at your television, if you feel like designing a drinking game around Opposite Day that is sure to kill you (He leaps out of the boat to get away from the shark?? Take a drink!), fire this film up. I’ve done my best to dissuade you while staying under five thousand words— your suffering is no longer my responsibility.

I’m full of roiling hate, oceans of roiling hate containing gigantic sharks with teeth bigger than my rather immense forehead—which is appropriate, given the movie that Matt Kelly suggested I watch this week.

Shark Attack 3: Megalodon is a frightening example of what can happen when your sound guy runs amok with his dubbing. I fear for my safety, I fear for the safety of my never-to-be-existent children, that one day they may find themselves unable to speak, only able to laugh like assholes whenever someone of a different race speaks to them.

Directed by David Worth (Lady Dragon, Lady Dragon II), written by the duo who brought you the previous two Shark Attack movies (Scott Devine and William Hooke), this steaming pile of krill was released straight to video in 2002, allowing it to bypass the average person’s radar (lucky, lucky average person).

What was the average person missing? Actors John Barrowman (Torchwood’s Captain Jack Harkness), Jenny McShane (um…), and Ryan Cutrona (24’s Admiral John Smith and Mad Men’s Gene Hoftstadt) doing battle with a giant shark. Sounds pretty amazing, right? We get somebody to zap in a torpedo-rigged TARDIS right into the belly of the beast, BOOM, no problem.

Well, that’s not what happens. So much for your connections, Barrowman.

The end of every James Bond movie I've ever seen.

This feast of a film opens with a brief, barely related, and completely unnecessary prologue where a diver for Apex Communications falls prey to a drive-by sharking. What this bit of background establishes for us is two things: 1) there’s a shark 2) while the movie may have been released in 2002, it was clearly shot in the 1970s.

Moving past that near-useless opening, we are introduced to Colima, Mexico’s Playa Del Rey Resort, manned and visited by robotic beings programmed with an unendingly creepy laugh track. These robots, should they be of a feminine appearance, do not have the capacity of language and only communicate with their brethren with various combinations of moans, cooing, and sounds of surprise. As for the males, the standard issue models are able to form simple sentences regarding their female counterparts, each sentence punctuated by mechanical laughter.

Unfortunately for these robots, a robot-eating shark has decided to spent some time at the resort’s beaches and soak up some rays and munch on some communications cable—you know, typical shark activities.

Unfortunately for this shark, Captain Jack Harkness is on the case.

Wait, what? Not Harkness??? What, just some douche named Ben and a paleontologist who could only pass for Laura Dern on account on blondness? Fuck this movie.

Not-Harkness (Barrowman) and Not-Dern (McShane) team up with some aging ex-Navy guy (Cutrona) and flounce around Colima ogling the scads of bare breasts while uncovering shark-hiding conspiracies set in place by heads of greedy corporations.

What’s the conspiracy?, I will pretend you cared enough to ask. Apex Communications is laying down miles and miles of communications cable underwater with the hope of wrangling billions of dollars from an international market, but there’s a problem… the cables emit such electricity that they’re waking up dinosaur sharks.

Okay, not “dinosaur sharks” like in ScyFy’s Dinoshark, but really big, supposedly extinct sharks called megalodons. And these megalodons are attacking the shit out of anyone who happens to be in the area when they stroll down the cable route. Yes, attacking the shit out of them. It’s part of the circle of life, just accept it.

Apex has learned about this side effect of their cables and, instead of doing something like taking care of the problem, they’ve decided to just keep on with it and either someone else will kill the sharks or they’ll eventually run out of customers. Either or.

Exhibit A: Man who was, indeed, attacked the shit out of.

With all of this asinine stupidity in place, there are four very redeeming parts of this movie.

1. A baby Megalodon decides to grab the rope of a helpless paraglider and slowly drags her kicking and screaming into the ocean where it can chomp her to little bits.

2. Caught in the midst of a ship cabin panty raid, Not-Dern pumps a round of lead directly into the thieving baby Megalodon’s mouth. Immediately before this moment, Not-Harkness is seen whacking the shark’s nose with a baseball bat, screaming “Die, die, die!!”

3. After wrapping up their shark-assassination plan, the charming and suave Not-Harkness says, “I’m really wired. What do you say that I take you home and eat your pussy?”

4. Mama Megalodon wakes up and starts eating boats. Please see the pictures below, as words cannot possibly wrap around the concept of how awesome this is.

In sum, this movie isn’t great. The first three-quarters of an hour is pretty tedious and entirely worth skipping, but once those forty-five minutes pass, even Disney can’t generate this kind of movie magic. So if you’re feeling like sharking it up tonight and getting your Megalodon on, sink your hundreds of pointy teeth into this baby on Netflix on Demand.

Tag: sharks

This Geek in Netflix: 2-Headed Shark Attack

FUCK.

This Geek in Netflix: Shark Attack 3: Megalodon