Film Review: 6-Headed Shark Attack (2018)

Rate This Movie

SYNOPSIS:

Attendees of a marriage boot camp on a remote island have to fight a 6-headed shark that attacks the beach.

REVIEW:

When assigned movies to review, I usually have a hard time deciding where to begin. With the fact that most of the films I end up reviewing end up being endurance tests of my will to sit through crap, determining which movie to start with can be like deciding whether I want to get punched in the right eye, the left eye, or kicked in the groin. Which is to say, none of the options are particularly enticing. With some trepidation, I started with 6-Headed Shark Attack. When I saw it was made by The Asylum, peddlers of such rip-offs like Transmorphers, I began to wonder if I made a terrible mistake.

On Isla Corazon, a fellow named William runs some kind of couples retreat meant to help them get over their relationship issues and reconnect with each other. However, William’s own wife is divorcing him, the people that he’s trying to help can be difficult to work with, and his clients start getting killed by a 6-headed shark. The shark, it turns out, is the result of a U.S. government secret genetic experiment that’s gotten loose. Because of course, it is.

After watching the movie, I couldn’t help but think that it seemed like the kind of movie you’d end up watching on SyFy channel, and, as it turns out, I was not wrong. It showed up on that channel under the monicker “Mutant Shark”. I’m not sure why they felt the need to slap another name on it. At least the name was accurate, the film definitely involves a mutant shark. However, the title 6-Headed Shark Attack is less generic and more to the point. The movie also has the hallmarks of a Syfy movie: shoddy acting, cliche characters and plot points, poor writing, and cheap special effects. Yet it manages to hover somewhere in that middle ground of being awful and mildly competent.

The story isn’t going to win awards for originality. After all, it dips into that well of the U.S. government having a top-secret project that created a monster that goes amok that so many other films have drawn from. The majority of the characters are underdeveloped stereotypes with no depth or growth. They really are there to get mowed down by the shark, so the film doesn’t spend much time making them particularly interesting. Sadly, this means that we don’t really care about their fates for the most part. Only two of them I found annoying enough to want to see them get killed by the titular monster of this movie, and only two I kind of wanted to see live. The rest were … well, they were there. That’s about as much as I can say for them.

The six-headed shark in question is brought to life by some CGI that would have looked shoddy in the 1990s. It’s not the worst I’ve ever seen, but it’s still bad enough that the creature doesn’t look believable in the slightest. Thus, it’s hard to take the creature seriously in the slightest. Scenes where you see the shark using two of its heads to push itself around so it can move on land actually caused me to start laughing because it looked so silly. Of course, the film never explains how the beast is able to survive on land, but then, it’s not like much thought was put into any aspect of this film. It seemed like the production company was just trying to cash in on the cult popularity of Sharknado by making their own ridiculous shark-related franchise, so I’m pretty sure not many people behind the scenes worried about such minor things as logic anyways. Since this is another installment to a franchise centering around multi-headed sharks, perhaps an explanation to how the creature can survive on land, and why the government would want to create such things, is explained. Even if it is, I’m pretty sure the explanation would turn out to be really stupid.

While I’ve spent a lot of time pointing out the things that are bad about this film, but that’s not to say that this movie is a complete waste of anyone’s time. There’s a goofiness about the whole thing that manages to make it kind of unintentionally funny. The few times the movie tries at humor it fails. It only causes laughter when it’s trying to be serious, which actually manages to make it kind of endearing. While the acting is questionable, it’s not terrible either. Of course, after seeing as many crap movies as I have, my bar for what constitutes tolerable acting and bad acting may be lower than for most people.

6-Headed Shark Attack is one of those goofy little movies that manages to be engaging and entertaining. It’s another one of those cheese-fests that you can have a few friends join you and have some fun laughing at the film.