2-Headed Shark Attack (2012)

Foywonder |

Jan 31, 2012

Cover art:

news/dec11/thsa.jpg

Starring Brooke Hogan, Carmen Electra, Charlie O’Connell, Christina Bach Norman, David Gallegos, Corinne Nobili

Directed by Christopher Ray

1 Body, 2 Heads and 6,000 Teeth declares the tagline.

More like 2 heads, many boobs and no brains.

2-Headed Shark Attack is a total Joe Bob Briggs kind of movie, if you know what that means. It’s more Piranha 3D than Mega Shark vs., more in the vein of a drive-in b-movie of the past than a Syfy original movie of today. Blood, boobs, and beast are the three b-movie fundamentals, and there is no shortage of all three b’s in this one.

Boobs – and I don’t mean Charlie O’Connell’s professor character since he was more of a putz than a boob – I mean actual boobs. Hardly a scene goes by without seeing a buxom young gal in a bikini top. Everywhere you look there’s ample cleavage staring back at you. The producers must have saved a fortune on wardrobe. This is supposed to be a semester at sea college class, but let me assure you there’s very little learning taking place on this boat. If you look at this collection of female students, almost all of which could be contestants in a Hooters bikini contest, and their male hardbody classmates, most of whom look like they could be cast members of “The Jersey Shore” and have an equal aversion to wearing shirts, this looks less like a floating classroom and more like a “Girls Gone Wild” party boat.

In fact, I wouldn’t even say this movie stars Brooke Hogan. I would say this movie stars Brooke Hogan’s cleavage. It is constantly on display at all times. I’m surprised the director even bothered to include her head in certain shots.

I also wouldn’t say this movie stars Carmen Electra either because, well, she’s barely in the movie, and all she’s there for is to provide yet another set of ample bosoms to ogle, whether they be in a tight tank top or in a bikini when she decides to get some sun, practically breaking the fourth wall when doing so by posing for the camera as if she were taking part in a swimsuit photo shoot. She does get to repeatedly yell the line “Get out of the goddamn water!” So I guess there was some acting involved.

It becomes apparent after a short while that the high body count is less a matter of gluttony and more because this two-headed shark just gets off on killing people. It swims past a guy making him think for a moment he’s going to be safe, then comes back around and bites his leg off, then comes back around to tail slap him high into the air, and finally leaps straight out of the water to double chomp this poor bastard to death on his way down. That’s not hunger. That shark is just being a dick. And it’s awesome.

There are some pretty creative and even gruesome kills in this one of the most entertaining movies The Asylum has ever produced. Even its shortcomings are more a source of amusement than a detriment. Thank goodness, too, because this movie is dumber than a bag of hammers.

Characters keep saying and doing things that defy common sense. One character will do something that would only make sense if this character had somehow heard what had just been discussed in a motorboat many, many, many yards away. That same character can actually get a phone signal out in the middle of the ocean but never during their stranding does he or anyone else think to try and use his phone to place a rescue call. The deckhands don’t speak a word of English; yet, they completely understand when spoken to in English. The captain of the boat gets eaten when she scubas down to weld a crack in the hull, but it takes what felt like hours before anyone onboard noticed she had yet to resurface.

By the third act… what can I say? Anything goes nonsense. The atoll begins crumbling into the sea! Random tsunamis! Random shark attacks! Random explosions! There’s a gigantic 2-headed shark that can seemingly cause earthquakes by ramming into the atoll, and people are trying to fight it off with nothing more than pointy sticks! If the zombified corpse of Jacques Cousteau had suddenly emerged from the watery depths to try and suck their brains out through his rebreather, I wouldn’t have been at all shocked.

The student I jokingly dubbed “M. Night Horshack” (you’ll understand why when you see the actor) deduces that the shark is attracted to the electrical currents generated by boat engines and underwater welding torches. He didn’t mention how the electricity generated when a guy and two girls have a naked ménage a trois in the surf could also set its appetite into motion. The shark took so long to finally move in for the kill during that ménage a trois scene I began to wonder if it had stopped to watch when the two girls starting making out.

The quality of the two-headed shark effects are all over the map, at worst like animation from a very high-end video game. The inarticulate practical shark heads used during close-up shots of the actors getting munched on are laughably unconvincing in a charmingly b-movie sort of way.

My only real quibble with the effects work would be how there appeared to be next to no continuity in regard to the actual size of the shark. Its first appearance would have you thinking each head was the size of a Megalodon. Often it looked like Jaws with two large heads. Other times it was almost as big as the school boat. Then we’ll see it attack completely submerged in shallow water; afterwards, Brooke Hogan still gets to utter a line about how the shark can’t attack in shallow water because it’s so big. The exact size of this shark with two heads changed so often I kept waiting for a scene where it jumped out of a sink.

If you’ve read this review and you think this movie sounds like it’s for you, then this movie is for you, and if not, I would strongly advise you to stay as far away from 2-Headed Shark Attack as possible. Me? I was thoroughly entertained for 80 minutes and had far more fun watching this than I did Shark Night.

Two heads. Many boobs. No brains. Three and a half knives. Joe Bob says, “Check it out.”