Bad Movie Mayhem: Dam Sharks! I Don’t Think No Beaver Did That…

It’s that time of the month again when we recognize our comrade’s sacrifice of brain cells as she recaps and reviews the latest bad movie to cross her path. And in this case, it’s a dam good one. (Well, bad one, as her review might lead you to believe.)

JB Rockwell is the author of Hecate, Serengeti, and Dark and Stars. Serengeti is currently close to topping the charts on Audible under the contemporary sci-fi genre! You can visit her on www.jenniferbrockwell.com

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Dam Sharks!

I Don’t Think No Beaver Did That…

By J.B. Rockwell

Alright, alright, I can already hear it: ‘Another shark movie, J.B.? Can’t you watch something different?’

Well, yes, honestly, but this one called to me. Why, you ask? Two simple reasons:

1. The title includes an exclamation point. That’s right, I didn’t add that punctuation to increase your excitement, that exclamation point was already there.
2. This tagline: Voracious sharks use human bodies to build dams.

Right away, you know this movie is going to be bad, especially since it’s a SyFy Original. The only question is: how bad?

The answer? Horrible. Terrible on a whole new level. So bad I ended up watching Ghosts of Mars as a palate cleanser and started thinking: ‘Hey, this movie isn’t as bad as I remember.’ So bad Anaconda 3, the reigning champion of craptastic movies and ensconced leader of my stinkeroo movies board, moved down a notch, dethroned by this upstart, trainwreck of a movie.

That’s how bad Dam Sharks! is.

For shame, Jason London. For shame.

Oh, and in case any of you are wondering, no, there are no naked ladies or bouncing bare boobies in this movie. We have one female Deputy with a slightly prominent chest and second female who, through a series of shark-related circumstances, ends up with a bare midriff but that’s it.

Sorry, guys. Ya want naked ladies, and convenient camera angles accentuating boobs and booty? This ain’t your movie. Go watch minutes 8-10 of Whiteout for that.

So, what does this movie have to offer. Well, not much. Bad dialogue, much of which is shamelessly stolen from other movies. An especially sad attempt at humor that comes across as simultaneously boring, infuriating and definitely not funny. A whole bunch of cast members I’ve never heard of and honestly don’t especially care to see again—Jason London included.

Hmm….what else… Alright. I’ll give it this: besides the sharks that alternately ‘sploded, got shootified, or were otherwise done in in one manner or another, no animals were killed. I like that. Pisses me off when some poor Fluffy or Spot of Bluebell bites the big one in the name of munchity-munching.

Stick to offing bimbos and asswads, Hollywood and not-quite-Hollywood. Keep your grubby, murdering paws off my cute little animals.

Right. I feel better now. I found one good thing to say about this movie. The rest of it…well, the rest of it’s crap, pointless and not at all worth watching.

But you’re going to, aren’t you?

*sigh*

Fine. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Plot:

A violent storm sends a swarm of bull sharks up river to where the salmon seem to be spawning only the bull sharks have other ideas and start using fisherman, zip liners and anything or anyone they can take a bite out of to use them as dam reinforce.

Yes, the sharks are turning body parts into a dam.

Meanwhile, the 19th biggest tech com company in the US is having a retreat right off the beaten path by the river. Soon man and nerd have to beat these damn sharks back!

Note: This is where you should start thinking: Wow! What a crap hole. I think I will most definitely never watch this.

Trust that instinct. Step away from the remote.

The Cast:

For the first time ever, I’m not going to bother listing the cast. Trust me, you’ve never heard of any of these people and honestly I can’t even tell for sure who played who when reading through the online credits. I’ve never even seen any of these people in anything before or since, mostly likely because at least one of them is primarily a stunt double and likely only got an acting part this time because she’d do the stunts for free.

And act for free, likely. This is not Oscar worthy stuff.

Oh, and there’s Jason London. His character’s sort of a second string throw in, but I’ll mention him because at least he’s a name you might know.

Jason London (Best known for being Jeremy London’s twin brother) as Tanner Brooks: Corporate Douchebag.

Budget & Box Office Info:

• Release Date: 25 July 2016

• Budget: Not available, probably $2
• Box Office Sales: Not available, probably $0.50

Sequels & Crossovers:

Inspired by every D-rate Shark-based movie SyFy ever released including Ice Sharks, Ozark Sharks, Planet of the Sharks, and others). Created in a desperate attempt to capitalize on the short-lived and inexplicable Sharknado frenzy that swept across the US for a week or two before blowing out to see with the rest of the effluent and trash.

Although there doesn’t appear to be a sequel, I fully expect one to be created when the Sharknado effect boomerangs back to the US in a decade or so.

The Dam Sharks! Story (in a Nutshell):

A storm, presumably (at least that’s the running theory offered up by not-shark-scientist Deputy Debbie—note, I call her Deputy Debbie throughout because who the hell knows what her actual name was in this movie) traps a flock of bull sharks in an inland river.

Now they’re killing everyone they can get their teeth on and, taking a cue from Beaver Bob the Builder, incorporating their bodies into a river-stopping dam to end all dams!

Oh, and there’s a Deputy and some city folk on a corporate retreat, some backwoods Jethro for color, but mostly they’re just hanging around to get munchified…

The Dam Sharks! Recap:

Ten seconds into the movie, the first chickie-poo dies. Munched by a shark mid-air, if you can believe it. While cliff diving. Into a river.

Yup, right to the shark munching. This movie does not play about. Of course, it also takes its sweet timing explaining how said sharks ended up in said fresh water river—far, far from the ocean, apparently, and in no apparent hurry to leave. Oh, and bull sharks can, apparently, survive in fresh water. So, while the eventual explanation for how they got there—something about a storm and sharks getting sucked up river which sounds a bit too much like the plot to Sharknado for my comfort—there’s actually some thin, tenuous and highly improbably science behind the whole ‘sharks in a river’ idea.

Not the dams, though. Not unless they met up with some beavers along the way…

Right. Back to the movie.

With Munch #1 down, we quickly dive into the D-rate movie favorite way of introducing characters: force-feeding in rapid-fire succession to ensure you never get anyone’s name, much less too attached.

First comes Deputy Debbie and her testosterone-fueled diver buddy who are spending a relaxing afternoon on the river inspecting a suspicious-looking dam. Naïve to the cliff diving horror happening up river…or down river…or somewhere river since this is presumably the same river where snack diver got jerkified by that dolphin leaping shark.

Elsewhere, at band camp, a bunch of city folk from a tech company are out enjoying a weekend in the country. At band camp.

Note: It’s not really band camp, it’s come kind of corporate wilderness retreat.

A quick headcount puts the Nerd Brigade at ten ready and willing victims just waiting for sharkypoo and the gang to chow on down. As with Deputy Debbie, I completely missed all of their names—didn’t care, really, they’re all destined to be chum. As part of the introductions, we’re treated to some slapstick, sidesplitting humor. Ya know, the kind of rip-roaring dialogue that’s…well, not at all funny, honestly. Just sort of stupid and annoying because it’s trying really hard to be funny and ends up really being anything but.

So, introductions made, we head back to the river, just in time to watch Diver Dudebro get bit in half by some sharks. He’s a tasty little morsel in all that SCUBA gear and spongy wetsuit, but strangely the sharks aren’t interested in eating him. Instead, they take him for a little shark ride through the river. One that ends at that ‘too big to be a beaver’ dam, where his mortal remains are impaled on a jutting piece of timber—embedded in the damn with a dozen other dead bodies these industrious little sharks are using to reinforce their dam.

Note: These are some sneaky-ass, smart little bastards. Got structural engineering degrees and everything. No wonder the beavers skipped town.

Elsewhere on the river, a redneck with a shotgun and some dynamite is out ‘fishing’. Sure enough, the ripe smell of chewing tobacco and Marlboro-infused flannel soon attracts the attention of the local freshwater shark pack who apparently need a few more meat sacks to complete their Eiffel Tower of Damdon. Well, jokes on them, because Jethro’s a wily old cooter. He escapes their clutches and high tails it away from that river, running straight into the arms and mostly-covered-up boobs of Deputy Debbie, Fish and Game Wrangler.

After swapping shark attack stories, Double D follows Hooch to his murder cabin for a spot of tea. Or white lightning. Possibly tea and white lightning since Debbie’s a busty deputy lady and Jethro’s a hard-bitten, seldom-bathing, heart-of-gold redneck who fishes with dynamite and a shotgun and (probably) brews moonshine in his toilet.

Whatever their drinking, it leads to some cogitating and finally someone bothers to ask how sharks, known for salt water living, ended up in this here fresh water, free-flowing river.

Jethro’s clueless—he knows shotguns, dynamite and hooch, but not much else—but part-time marine biologist and full-time SyFy shark movie watcher Deputy Debbie has a theory: what if that storm everyone keeps mentioning but we never actually saw happen flushed them down the river and got them stuck behind that dam? I mean, it makes sense, right? Personally, I find sharks in the stream-fed pond behind my house pretty much every time it rains really hard.

*eyerolls so hard*

Right. So with no other theories than Debbie’s—which is really, really stupid—Jethro convinces her to do the smart thing and use his radio to call for help. This being a SyFy movie, thought, no one bothers to answer. Also being a SyFy movie, the call inexplicably stirs up those sharks out there in the river, and some poor, unsuspecting fly fisherman gets crunch-a-mucnhed down.

Wait. Back up a step. Did I mention that Jethro and Deputy Debbie have history? Yeah, we learn that from tea time as well.

No, not that kind. Sheesh, get your mind out of the gutter. He is indeed a dirty old, rule-bending redneck and for unexplained reasons the Deputy’s been putting up with his increasingly illegal shenanigans even though she suspects the Feds are after him, but it’s not like she wants to sleep with him. Just, ya know, look out for him. Like a daughter looking out for her really creepy dad.

Evidently this chick never heard of the Unibomber. Just immediately trusts and feels sorry for every crotchety, survivalist redneck she finds living inside a tin-roofed shack.

But enough of Debbie and her dirty Jethro daddy, let’s get back to that river.

What’s this? A family of tubers larking about? Well, munch-munch-munch, it’s time for the Shark Attack Pack to—

Shit. I should’ve started a body count earlier. *sharpens pencil, tallies up dead bodies* Lemme see. We’ve lost Cliff Diver, Dudebro Diver, Fly Fisherman Guy, and now a family of four…

Current Dam Sharks! Death Body Count: 7

…Not including the sneak peak of all the previously killed bodies shish-kebobbed on the shark dam.

*snicker* Shark dam. Makes me laugh every time.

Wait, what? We’re back to Jethro and Deputy Debbie already? Alright. Looks like they’ve got some dynamite—bet Jethro’s got tons of that stuff stashed around his shack—and a plan to use it to make those sharks go away.

Dynamite: Because in order to fight the shark, you’ve gotta be the shark, and that involves dynamite. Obviously.

Plan in place and carefully (not) thought out, the Hydrodynamic Duo set off for that damn. They’ve got a boat for a-travelin’, a wad of blow and a cooter truck, but get distracted along the way by a couple of hapless zip liners who somehow manage to fall into the shark infested waters.

Seriously. This movie comes up with a thousand and one force-fed and highly improbably ways to get people in, on and over the water for the sole purpose of setting them up for a pretty-much obvious demise. Also, spoiler alert, neither of the zip liners make it despite Deputy Debbie plugging away gamely with her rifle and missing everything but the water a mile down river.

RIP zip liners.

Current Dam Sharks! Death Body Count: 9

You will note at this point that I haven’t mentioned the corporate wilderness retreat people since the start of this movie. They’ve been popping in now and then to play paintball and nosh on some grubbage and pretend to be funny, but mostly this part of the storyline just annoys me. I don’t plan on mentioning it again until it actually intersects with the sharks and their dam building.

Speaking of which, Deputy Debbie and Jethro finally reach the dam, only to find it (1) much, much bigger than it was before, and (2) quite obviously augmented with bodies, most of them piled up and sticking out of the water.

Elsewhere, because nothing has died in at least five minutes, we encounter two idiots fishing in a tin rowboat, using meat hooks baited with quartered chickens to lure…

Hell, I don’t know. Elephants, maybe? What would chicken fishing idiots be fishing for on a river?

Salmon. They keep mentioning salmon, so let’s go with that. No idea why you’d use chickens and meat hooks to fish for salmon from a row boat but there’s no explanation for this that really matters so I’m moving on. The important this is:

Current Dam Sharks! Death Body Count: 11

By the way, is anyone else wondering why the sharks are making the dam bigger? I mean, yeah, they’ve got walnut-sized brains so I’m not expecting them to have some overly complicated grand plan, but there’s no plausible reason given for why they’d go out of their way to stay here rather than following the flow back to the ocean. To be honest, I can’t come up with any reason why they’d be building the Great Wall of Bodyland—

Unless…

Shit. This is a SyFy movie. They’ve got feet, right? The sharks are flooding the river so they can make a run for it on—

Kaboom!

Oh. *blinks* Never mind, Deputy Debbie and her inept hillbilly partner just blew up the goddamn dam.

Pissed off, the water now filled with blood and dead body parts (shark and human, both) the shark engineers screech their ‘I’m mad and you’re gonna know it’ war cry and swim off to…

Wreak havoc? Get a milkshake? Who the hell knows. I bet they aren’t done with this whole dam thing, though. Sharks smart enough to build one dam have to be smart enough to build another, after all.

Evidently, Deputy Debbie feels the same way. She even takes it a step further, by updating her earlier postulation: the storm didn’t trap the sharks on the river, they ended up there and ‘found a smorgasbord’, as she puts it.

So…what? The dam isn’t really a dam? It’s some kind of timber infused pantry?

Riiiiggghhttt. That makes a lot of sense.

Ooh! Ooh! The corporate nincompoops finally made it onto the river for lunch! Chomp-chomp-chomp.

Current Dam Sharks! Death Body Count: 14

Elsewhere, Jethro and Deputy Debbie have regrouped and come up with a new plan to do the sharks in. No idea what that plan is because I got bored with their heart-to-heart moment and stopped listening, but…. they do eventually hook up with one half of the surviving corporate rafting idiots, prompting Deputy Debbie, in a fit of Annie Oakly-ism, to save them with a trick shot, underwater shark snipe.

Evidently, she’s got x-ray vision or something because she’s able to spot an underwater shark in the distance and one-shot-kill it from the deck of Jethro’s craptastic boat. Never mind that the last time she wielded that same rifle—roughly 20 minutes ago, movie time—she popped off a good two dozen shots under similar conditions and didn’t hit a damn thing.

Pardon me, dam thing.

Meanwhile, on the other boat, shamelessly stolen lines from Aliens get tossed around and corporate douchebag Jason London loses his head to a shark.

Current Dam Sharks Death Body Count: 15

At this point, I realized we hadn’t seen Deputy Debbie and Jethro for while. Apparently, the move gave up on our intrepidly mismatched duo since they never managed to successfully address the shark problem—much less the dam problem—and decided to focus all hope on the B-Team of city slicker corporate types floating aimlessly around on their rafts. Being tech people, they put their heads together and promptly come up with nothing. But Nerd Girl happens to have a bow with her—no explanation for why, but someone obviously wasn’t content with Aliens references and decided to interject some Hunger Games as well—and offers up the obvious solution: why not strap some CO₂ cartridges to the tips of her arrows and fire them at the sharks?

Brilliant right? Wait, no. The opposite of that. Last I checked, CO₂ cartridges weren’t particularly explosive—which these arrows certainly are. Inexplicably so, given there’s no obvious ignition source and, ya know, the whole CO₂ not being flammable thing. Anywho, Nerd Chick gives it her all, and her arrows explode in dramatic fashion wherever they land.

Mostly, in the water, which explodes anyway.

Worst. Katniss. Everdeen. Impersonation. Ever.

Unlike Katniss and her never-ending arrow pouch, the city folk eventually run low on arrows. At which point, they decide to do things the old-fashioned way and just beat the sharks to death with their paddles.

Because for some reason the dozen sharks with hundreds of razor-sharp teeth that surround them very politely refuse to sink said teeth into their inflatable raft.

Did I mention there were actually two rafts filled with corporate stooges? Well, there are. Or were. And they got split up. The arrow crew manage to punch a hole in their own raft and sink it, and the other crew (whom Deputy Debbie rescued earlier) go walkabout, find a conveniently placed dead tree straddling the shark-infested water and decide the smartest thing to do would be to walk across it.

Guess how that turns out…

Current Dam Sharks! Death Body Count: 18

Alright, let’s see. We’ve got three corporate types uneaten—

Munch.

Current Shark Death Body Count: 19

Right. We’ve got two corporate types uneaten, plus Jethro and Deputy Debbie who, after an extended lunch break and a nap (probably) finally decide to rejoin the movie. In an inspired moment of heroism, Jethro bravely announces that they need to blow up the ‘damn dam’—original, I know, since they did that exact thing last time—only to be immediately eaten by a shark.

Current Dam Sharks! Death Body Count: 20

Our remaining troop of intrepid heroes waste no time mourning him, however. Instead, they launch two scuba tanks at the dam—no idea where those came from, but they’re out of dynamite so…whatever—and blow them up with another arrow.

Flare-tipped, this time. For extra-added kaboom.

With Dam #2 busted, Deputy Debbie spares a melancholy moment to collect Jethro’s sweat stained hat. No doubt thinking to treasure it forever and perhaps add it to her hip Fish and Game uniform. With their fallen fellow properly mourned, the survivors decide to pack it in and go for coffee because, ya know, what else would you do after ridding a river of the shark-finned scourge?

Or did they…

Deep beneath the water, a sharkykins collects a headless body.

Aaaaaannnnd….scene.

Tune in next time for Dam Sharks! 2: Sharks Mate with Beavers and Do the Whole Dam Thing Right This Time.

Final Thoughts:

No more shark movies. Seriously. I’m done. Yeah, I know—I picked this movie so I only have myself to blame, but I’m gonna steer clear of the big fish for a while and stick with other big monster munchers. Like one of those Chupacabra movies, maybe. Yeah. Chupacabra vs. The Alamo. I bet that’s pretty good…

And for any of you thinking, ‘Wow, this is so bad I’ve got to watch it’, please, for the love of god, don’t!

Overall Rating:

• Bad Moving Rating: 0.25 (out of 5)
• Regular Movie Rating: 0.005 (out of 5)

Bonus Material:

Quotes!

I didn’t bother because they didn’t bother. Seriously. I lost track of how many lines the writers shamelessly stole from other movies and slammed into this script. In fact, when I think back over this movie, I get queasy, but once I get past that I can only come up with one snippet of non-stolen dialogue that stands out in any way:

Hillbilly Jethro [on seeing the much bigger shark dam]: FUBAR