SKY SHARKS

CONTAINS SPOILERS????

Is it ironic that in Sky Sharks there are just too many plot elements, spectacular events and general things happening for one film, yet one film is absolutely more than enough? So many strands going on, flitting back and forth between them, yet at the same time there's hardly anything there and what there is is, ultimately, not very good. In no particular order there are Nazis, war criminals, naked women, sharks, invisibility cloaks, mutation serums, sex in the lavatory, zombie super soldiers, Herman Goering, more naked women, the Vietnam war and much terrible music. Ingredients there are plenty, but they've not been prepared, measured or cooked properly and the result is mostly a lumpen, indigestible pudding.

Richter was a former Nazi scientist brought to the US under Operation Paperclip and is now a billionaire tech mogul; one of his wartime schemes involved not only the development of an evil super-soldier strength serum but also the creation of invisible flying sharks to take control of the skies. No, really. Anyway, the ship they were all on has now been thawed out due to global warming and they're out and destroying airliners full of disposable children and familiar guest stars (Robert LaSardo, Lynn Lowry), and only Richter's two daughters can save the day - and one of those has been infected with the super serum.

It's never actually boring, because there's just too much going on, but it's obviously absolute nonsense, trying to top the SyFy/Asylum stupidometer and, yes, succeeding. Even given the near-toxic stupidity levels of Sharknado 4 and Mega Piranha, Sky Sharks is probably the maddest shark movie thus far. Yet there's a sense of pandering to the lowest levels: ultra-gory carnage (some prosthetic, in which Tom Savini was involved and which looks great, and some CGI, which looks terrible), cheap, crass and ugly nudity (do they not know that we have porn pretty much on tap now?) and fan favourite cameos (including Amanda Bearse and Tony Todd), as if those elements by themselves will suffice. Tits, blood and the bloke from Candyman - instant horror classic, that'll do.

Cult movies come about by accident, never by purpose - like a lot of Troma movies, this is too graphically gory to be funny, but it's too stupid to take even slightly seriously. (The comparison with Troma ends there: Sky Sharks just isn't in their league for obnoxious bad taste and puerile shock value grossout.) Still, it does feel like another attempt to deliberately create a cult movie and it doesn't work because it's always the audience, not the makers, who decide which films attain cult status and which don't. Just adding sharks to a rubbish Nazi movie (Iron Sky was a fair stab, but lost it in the second half), or just adding Nazis to a rubbish shark movie, isn't enough. There are a few minor, momentary pleasures, and the physical splatter effects are enjoyable, but those aside it's a joke of a film, and not a very well told one. The post-credits bit is a fake trailer for Sky Frogs, which one of the airline passengers was watching on his iPad about seventeen hours before, and which outstays its welcome at around two minutes just as efficiently as Sky Sharks manages at an excessive hundred and two.

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