Main cast: Danny Trejo (Max Burns), Karrueche Tran (Maggie Peterson), Jaason Simmons (Dr Ted Nelson), Rob Van Dam (Stanley), Jena Sims (Dr Laura Thomas), Brad Mills (Greg), Scott Reynolds (Ryan Bennett), Rico Ball (Omar), Dawn Hamil (Alison), Stephen Harwick (Mark), Brianna Ferris (Rosemarie Grant), and Carlos Rivera (Howard Grant)
Director: Christopher Ray
While 2-Headed Shark Attack was bad enough to be good in some ways, the sequel 3-Headed Shark Attack seems to be the result of someone holding a gun at Christopher Ray’s head and telling him to direct this thing or they will leak some embarrassing photos to the people who knows him or something. Everything is pretty terrible in a way that is just not fun to mock.
First, the story. Basically, we have a three-headed shark this time, because we need to outdo the previous movie after all. Our heroine is Maggie Peterson, who joins an underwater research facility Persephone as the newest marine biologist. She bumps into Greg, whom she used to date until he dropped out of college; he may not have the degree but he has the passion to save the environment and all that, so he’s basically one of the muscles around the place. Love have to wait, wait the shark causes the Persephone to explode in a hilariously bad CGI scene that is reminiscent of a computer game from the early 1990s. Maggie and Greg plus a few future shark chows escape, but they have to get back to land with a hungry mutant shark on their rear ends. Can macho fisherman Max Burns help them?
This movie isn’t fun to mock because it is just incompetently put together from start to finish. The same stock footage of the mutant shark is used again and again, so the shark comes off as having some kind of teleportation when the stock footage shows it swimming in darkly lit waters only to suddenly have it show up at a boat in the next scene. Scenes can also be disjointed; some same scenes are reused closely together, as if I wouldn’t notice, while other scenes are arranged out of order. For example, when a tourist ship is attacked by the shark, a couple is seen running to the window to look, but in the next scene they are seen jumping out of their table to dash for the exit, followed by a scene of them running away from the window. Huh? Later, that same couple are seen running to look at the window again.
The acting is stunningly bad. No one here is capable of displaying believable emotion. My favorite is the captain of that tourist ship who speaks in a low, emotionless monotone before waddling sleepily away from the scene as if nothing unusual had happened. As the principle leads, Brad Mills and Karrueche Tran – especially Mr Mills, who is really dire here – display the range of a tree stump. I know, this is a movie destined for constant rotation on Syfy, hence it is not something one brags about to strangers in a party, but still, a little more effort to come off less like wind-up toys on screen will be nice.
The characters here all do stupid things, except for Greg and Maggie, and no, that isn’t a compliment to our twosome because they just don’t do anything. Everyone else that tries to do something dies, and in the end, it’s by luck and plot armor that these two get to have a happy ending. They don’t even kill the shark! They just survive because everyone else died trying to escape or kill that thing. This movie doesn’t even try to give me reason to root for them, how bizarre.
3-Headed Shark Attack is a huge time-waster without any good pay-off. The only reasons I can think of to watch this thing are: (a) you made a mistake, oops, and (b) you are a casting agent and you want examples of why not to hire anyone involved in this show. Okay, Danny Trejo is alright, but he’s definitely not going to save this piece of crap.
