Shark Lake

2015 | 92 min

Jerry Dugan

In a northern Nevada lake town, sharks have people on the menu. Clint (Dolph Lundgren), an animal smuggler, loosed a bull shark in the lake five years ago before a jail term prevented him from delivering it to a local crime boss. The shark was preggers and now it and its grown pups are busy snacking on people. Deputy Hernandez (Sara Malakul Lane) is tasked with finding the sharks and is also Clint’s ex with a creepy age difference between them that suggest that the sharks aren’t the only predators around.

Going into the plot more than this is just a waste of time. The story is bad. The directing is bad. The acting is bad. The effects are bad. The score is perhaps the worst part. It’s just a bad film all around. Perhaps with enough drugs the brief scene where Clint wrestles and punches a shark could be mildly entertaining. But otherwise it’s not even bad in an interesting way. Instead, it’s just a project that somehow got funded with the help of grants and tax breaks and a bunch of people got paychecks for it. I’m happy for them.

Shark Lake could have been fun had the sharks been munching on the rich who have taken over Lake Tahoe and most other waterfront spaces in the US. They certainly have it coming. But that’s not what happens. Instead we have bull sharks living somewhere where bull sharks cannot live and eating quantities of people that bull sharks cannot eat and generally doing things sharks cannot do. You can tell the screenwriter just phoned it in. You can tell the rest of the production did as well.