SHARK HUNTER

Professor Spencer Northcut is called to participate in a recovery and reconstruction expedition of a submarine base after an attack by a huge creature has devastated everything and killed two researchers. Northcut, as the designer of an advanced submarine, is involved as a technical consultant, but the professor also finds himself being a key element against the monster that caused the accident. It is a Megalodon, that is, a gigantic prehistoric shark that is probably the same one that many years before massacred his family in front of his eyes. I wonder why such poor productions destined for home video or cable TV insist on making films about megalodons. We already have to resign ourselves to the idea that most of the descendants and stepchildren of the glorious aquatic beast movies of the 70s today have the appearance of horrible straight-to-video productions with very fake digital animals, but when we find a third of them bringing prehistoric sharks to the screen that do not integrate well with the scenarios and the minds of the viewers... well, at that point the discouragement is double! It doesn't take much to realize that if you don't have the means to bring a standard-sized shark to the stage, much worse could happen with a 40-meter beast, but this seems not to enter the heads of crazy producers who finance various "Shark Attack 3: Megalodon", "Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus", "Megalodon" or this "Shark Hunter" and then the results always speak clearly: unsustainable trash even for the most die-hard fans of the bad. But if the problems were limited only to the technical realization of the monster, one could somehow overlook it, after all "Snakes on a plane" did not have "perfect" snakes, but the movie entertains in its own way. No, the problems are many others and are called boredom, lack of any plausibility, mediocrity acting, amateur writing and general visual squalor. In "Shark Hunter" there is everything and more. The monster is perhaps one of the least bad seen in this type of film, but the rest leaks from all sides. The screenwriter Sam Wells, who is loosely inspired by the novel "MEG" by Steve Alten (and of which we were waiting for an official high-budget version, now "shipwrecked"), bets everything on the tormented character of Professor Northcut, completely forgetting the other half dozen characters who struggle in the story. Northcut, portrayed by a monosexpressive Antonio Sabato Jr. who has been subscribed to bad TV thrillers for at least fifteen years, is the classic movie professor, the usual handsome guy who has no real equivalent in reality, a guy tormented by the death of his parents at the hands of a prehistoric sea monster who - by chance - finds the opportunity to challenge again. The prologue in the past, which shows through a sort of vacation film the tragedy, is one of those bad ones that look like those ridiculous broadcasts of village festivals by local television stations, but the most ridiculous thing is that every time Northcut thinks about his past he always remembers that film, always the same two or three images, as if he had no other memories. But do you want to know what is the bottom reached by "Shark Hunter"? The ocean floor! Yes, because in two scenes set at the bottom of the sea - one of which is the mother scene of the initial megalodon attack on the submarine base - they were not able to build a minimally credible scenario. That is, it is noticed in a too shameless way that the film was shot in a stage set for the simple fact that there is no water! The divers float in an empty space simulating that they are floating, but the effect is almost more similar to that of an astronaut walking on the moon; and then there are no fish, no algae or seaweed, only darkness and these guys pretending to float. To simulate the debris and marine dust, they limited themselves to using a snow cannon set to minimum with the effect that the aforementioned dust settles in the foreground on the characters' suits. The overall effect is of unimaginable squalor. Then "Shark Hunter" suffers from the problem that most of these films suffer from, the tedious discrepancy between scenes set in the submarine - extremely boring and full of useless pseudo-technical chatter - and those outside, with the monster attacks, which abound in CGI and create a stark and very fake contrast with the first. The direction is by Matt Codd ("Epoch") and add that this film, unlike the horrible nonsense of Asylum such as "Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus", "Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus" and "Mega Piranha", also takes itself very seriously. Disastrous!