SHARK ATTACK 3: MEGALODON

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND A MISPLACED SENSE OF NOSTALGIA FOR THE UNSUNG GENIUS OF SHARK ATTACK 2

Yup, it's that ropey. Even given that one trip to the Shark Attack well was more than enough, and expectations for increasingly desperate cashins are accordingly lower than the bottom of the Mariana Trench, that's still no excuse. At least the second one had some nice Cape Town locations. But once you remove South Africa from the equation and replace it with Bulgaria standing in for Mexico (why not just shoot it in Mexico?) there's nothing to see here. Move along.

Once again ticking off a whole checklist of moments from Jaws, the basic plot of Shark Attack 3 is that there's a Megalodon off the Mexican coast, eating tourists and idiots and attracted to the area by radiation from a new fibre-optic cable. Hunky lifeguard Ben (John Barrowman and his teeth) and dull paleontologist Catalina (Jennifer McShane, who was actually in the first Shark Attack movie as a completely different character) try and take down a giant megalodon shark with the aid of a video crew and an old coot who happens, somewhat fortuitously, to have a torpedo in his garden shed. Can they save the day before the fibre-optic radiation wakes up a whole slew of megalodons and the VIP millionaires on a luxury corporate yacht get eaten?

It is quite obviously a load of old tat, and it's rubbish not in that mysterious and elusive so-bad-it's-rather-fun way, but just rubbish in that underachieving waste of time way, with subpar CG shark effects, terrible acting and obvious stock footage spliced into the underwhelming action. Eigth years on and we've not had a Shark Attack 4, and this might happily suggest that there's not enough money in this kind of thing, except we've had Shark In Venice and Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus, and Sharktopus still to come, so dumb Jaws clones are still obviously a financial goldmine. Maybe they had to upgrade to Windows Vista and the shark effects software wasn't compatible. Whatever the reasons, it's not worth bothering with, even to see John Barrowman, of all people, pretending to be attracted to Jennifer McShane, and finally getting some shower action with her thanks to the single crassest (apparently adlibbed) chatup line in movie history. Still not even as borderline passable as Shark Attack 2.

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