My friends, every once in a while, I get sad. Sometimes I watch these movies and they give me nothing but emptiness and hollowness. I wonder why I even bother. Then that rare thing happens that reaffirms by commitment to the craft, the one thing that reminds me why I get out of bed out in the morning other than to pee and eat. Today that one thing is 'Shark Attack 3: Megalodon'. A movie that is a dozen years old as of this writing, but one I just saw yesterday, and a movie that is so amazingly terrible, it has circled around to being amazingly awesome. I think I might be able to go on a few more months. Thanks 'Shark Attack 3'!
Ben Carpenter (John Barrowman) is happy. I know this because he grins all the damn time. It's very annoying. Ben is some kind of coastal security guard at some Mexican resort. Now it is this Mexican resort that is part of this films magic, in that this movie is shot in Bulgaria and is stocked with Bulgarian actors, including FCU favorite Atanas Srebrev, but yet all the characters have Hispanic surnames and speak in these gawdawful Spanish accents. Comic gold.
One day while mining for lobster with his boy Essi (George Stanchev), Ben finds a large shark tooth and immediately goes on the internet to some shark tooth website and posts it. Who knew such a thing even existed? Observing this shark tooth is the deliciously slutty paleontologist Dr. Cat Stone (Jenny McShane) and she is on a quick trip to Mexico to examine this amazing find. This leads us to another bit of oddness in that Dr. Cat lies to Ben and tells him she's a marine biologist as opposed to a paleontologist, and considering I don't think Ben knows the difference between the two, I'm not sure why she did this. I do know that Ben got really upset at her when he found out, despite the fact she was lounging around in a super tight tanktop with her boobs pushed up around her chin and circulation restricting tight jeans. This is what Dr. Cat wears around her hotel room when she wants to be comfortable, and that makes Dr. Cat awesome.
Meanwhile the Megolodon is steady eating beach combers and whatnot, Dr. Cat calls her crew to Mexico to film this ancient beast, with this crew using their fancy cameras to film close up shots of Dr. Cat's butt, which admittedly isn't very professional behavior. Grinning Ben urges his boss Ruiz (Bashar Rahal) to close the beaches… like that's ever happened in a shark attack movie… a situation which will leave Ben and Dr. Cat to attempt to take out the beast themselves. Which they do. Catch phrase and all. Yay!
NOT SO FAST MY FRIENDS! Because this party is just getting started. That was the baby megalodon, and his mommy who is roughly the size of the Eiffel Tower, is out and causing a ruckus. Now Ben, Dr. Cat and the ridiculously hardcore Chuck Rampart (Ryan Cutrona) have to try to bring it down. That is after Ben and Dr. Cat make sweet love. And how they got to making that sweet love is prefaced by one of the greatest lines in cinema history. The actual lovemaking looked a little uncomfortable for everyone involved, but getting there was something beyond sublime.
How do you destroy a skyscraper sized shark? If you're Chuck Rampart, you probably have destroyer busting missile in your possession. Chuck Rampart!
Look, director David Worth's 'Shark Attack 3: Megolodon' is awful. It's poorly acted, poorly shot, the sharks were mostly stock footage and the stock footage rarely matched the actual footage of our actors, the special effects were ass, and the narrative was complete and total nonsense. Phew, got that out of the way, because with all of that said, this is one of those rare occasions where complete incompetence equals cinema magic.
Say like a giant shark is ramming your giant yacht… thus would it make sense to voluntarily jump out of the safety of the big boat into the water where the shark is eating people? Why yes, that makes total sense to me because that's hilarious. If your smoking hot girlfriend gets naked on the beach, and note there is no shortage breasts in this movie, I suggest you take care of your business right there, as opposed to running into the dirty ass water where the shark is. Just a suggestion. Then there's the case of the awesome engineering of the Chuck Rampart's mini-sub. From the outside, maybe the size of Fiat 500, but once you get inside it's about the size of the U.S.S. Nimitz. That, my friend, is engineering at its finest. Lest we forget Chuck Rampart himself, a man so hardcore that he has pictures of both President Bush and Vice President Cheney on his wall, which in itself is badass, because who would voluntarily put those pictures on one's home wall unless one happened to be in a federal office… but Chuck has those portraits ABOVE his picture of the American Flag. Patriotically speaking, that's not cool. Unless, of course, it's Bush and Cheney. Oh, and watch Captain Jack swim away from the equivalent of nuclear blast. Then watch him grin again. If I didn't like John Barrowman, and I wanted to sabotage his efforts at landing that plum gig on Dr. Who followed by the Torchwood spinoff, I'd have slipped a copy of this movie into the hands of the Dr. Who producers during the search. Mr. Barrowman would be working at Kroger today if somebody had done that.
Wretchedly wonderful. 'Shark Attack 3: Megolodon'.
