Ghost Shark

It's not a 'Sharknado', which would be a tornado filled with sharks, which is kind of wacky… No sir, it's a 'Ghost Shark', which is a translucent shark which can appear in a bucket of water and kill you that way, which is kind of wackier. The real question that the concerned viewer of sub-quality cinema is probably asking themselves would be 'Given a choice, Christopher, which one should I watch?' Ultimately, that's crazy talk because you know you're gonna watch both them, but to play along I could only respond with 'would you rather die via bullet to the head or hung by the neck from a ceiling fan?' Either way you're dead. And either way, with either shark movie, your sub quality shark fetish will be temporarily satiated.

One night on the Louisiana coast a couple of folks are fishing for grouper or something when the championship fish they were about land was eaten by a Great White. This pisses my man off something awful who proceeds to shoot the shark with his .45, then finish it off with a crossbow to the eye. Unfortunately for the people in this town, this dying shark has presence of forethought to swim to an abandoned cave adorned with mystical hieroglyphics and die there, which will turn into it a translucent blue Ghost Shark. It's a little complicated how this happened, and we're not going to even try to explain it. Just know it's a bad thing.

Now we are introduced to our films star, Ava as played by the lovely Mackenzie Rosman from that show 'Seventh Heaven' and Mackenzie is all grown up now. Kind of. It looks like she's the same height when she started on that show as an eight year old, but the other decidedly female parts of her have certainly matured. Ava and her sister Cicely (Sloane Coe) are a little concerned because her dad was the captain of that chartered ship that was fishing for grouper, and dad is nowhere to be found, just his bloody ball cap. Then, minutes after finding dad's bloody ball cap, some annoying teenagers are eviscerated by a blue, translucent shark. Does local law enforcement believe this? Of course they don't, but our surviving kids know what they saw, and the sisters now know that their old man is all dead and stuff. They are sad.

Now what? Well, since it's a shark movie and all, there has to be some kind of 'Fun Event' that must go on, this time the fun event being the party of Cameron (Jaren Mitchell) who is having the pool party to end all pool parties. No worries though because there's no way a salt water shark could infest a fresh water swimming pool. Unless, of course, it's a GHOST SHARK yo! More annoying teenagers shall die. And that's just the beginning because the Ghost Shark is killing kids on water slides, killing kids playing in fire hydrants, killing plumbers, killing bikini clad hotties washing cars in the movies best scene… the ghost shark is off the chain. And I thought there was some kind of unwritten rule against killing children in these kinds of movies? Oh well, director Griff Furst totally didn't get that unwritten memo.

So how does one kill a Ghost Shark? For that we need to meet the town loon Mr. Finch (Richard Moll) who knows a thing or two about that mystical cave that reanimates dead things into murderous apportions, and all of the answers for this are in the Ancient Book of Mystical Stuff. This is cool and all… ancient legends, cryptic incantations, chants, mystical mumbo jumbo... but at the end of the day, if you really want to solve a problem, just blow something up. Somehow, someway, that usually solves your problem.

So… does 'Ghost Shark' suffer coming so close on the heels of 'Sharknado'? It might have, say had 'Sharknado' actually been any good. This isn't to say we weren't entertained by 'Sharknado' but in all honesty it was pretty awful and 'Ghost Shark' by comparison is less awful, as it turns out.

The good thing about a ghost shark, just like a sharknado, is that once the concept is introduced, at no point is it required to start making sense. This frees up the filmmakers, in this case the legendary Griff Furst, to concentrate on the important stuff, and in this case that would be gore effects and lots of women running around in bikinis. Yes, you could ask how a dying shark could makes its way into a cave and drop dead, the last 100 feet it probably had to walk into, but we're not going to ask that because it's silly. We often ask while watching hungry beast movies, 'when does the hungry beast get full?', but a ghost shark probably doesn't actually have a digestive system, so it will never get full, right? In the aforementioned movies best scene where the slutty chicks were washing cars, the adolescent in the red 'Stang felt the need to put dirt on the car before driving it to the car wash. Like the slutty chicks weren't going to wash the car if it was clean already. This kid clearly doesn't get the concept of slutty chick car washes.

Bodies get torn in half, bodies get split in two, limbs get severed, heads get removed, and bodies get torn in half. If you had an upper torso, there was good chance it would no longer be attached to your lower torso by the end of this movie.

Griff might've had us a little concerned before we fired up 'Ghost Shark' as his last SyFy shark movie 'Swamp Shark' was lacking, but we can say he made up for that misstep with this one. A good movie? Well, that's pushing it of course, but it is a movie with very little downtime, a little gore, a lot of TV safe skin and even more total nonsense, which all added to something not so bad.