Shark Exorcist is probably the first of many shark based movies that I will add to my Ode to Bad Reels column and this one does not disappoint when it comes to how utterly horrible this movie is. If you ever wanted to watch a shark movie where you never get to see the shark biting anybody or have a cohesive story with characters you get invested in and are scared for whenever they get into the water, then this is the movie for you. From the infamous studio that brought us a prior entry to my Ode to Bad Reels, The Amazing Bulk, comes this embarrassment of the shark horror genre. Shark Exorcist is probably the worst thing to ever be considered a movie, and I had to try very hard to find some humor in it to justify the hour of my life I had to give up for this outrageousness.
As I describe this movie, it might seem like it is just a collection of random scenes compiled together without any chronological sense, and that is because, it is. Shark Exorcist starts off with a Satan worshiping Nun killing a girl and feeding her to a possessed shark. When you first see the shark in the water, it is painfully obvious that it is just stock CGI footage of a shark that is used over and over again throughout the film. Another thing that you notice from this first scene is that we are not going to see the shark attack in this film. All we see is the CGI shark swimming and the actor struggling in the water and all the violence is hinted at off camera. After this first scene, the movie jumps ahead one year and we are introduced to three female characters who decide to go to a lake to tan on an overcast day. One of them decides to go into the water and gets attacked by the shark but seems to survive with a lot of blood but no bite mark to speak of.
The next scene is a walk through a hospital which just seems like the filmmaker just whipped out a camera while walking down a real hospital corridor. The two surviving friends talk about what happened and one does not seem to care about anything. Then we get introduced to this ghost hunting show filming by the water because they seem to know about the possessed shark somehow and even though we see the camera man film the host woman, in the next show she turns around and the camera guy is now behind her and she starts breaking the forth wall. She proceeds to check the rocks by the water and then goes into a weird seizure as though she was getting possesed. We then see the girl who was attacked by the shark hitch hiking because she wants to go back to the lake. She finds a guy, who looks like a pornstar, just sitting in his car and she asks him for a ride to the lake. While in the car the guy tries to touch her and she denies him but in the very next scene, they are practically naked in the lake making out. The girl then goes under water, turns into the shark and kills the guy. After this, we see a priest, who looks exactly like the porn star looking guy who just died, receiving a letter that his brother has been killed by a shark.
Now comes the oddest scene I have ever seen in any movie, ever. An actress, who looks like she is thirty, is either playing a child or a mentally disturbed women who is obsessed with sharks. We see her awkwardly playing in a playground until the shark possessed woman appears and talks to her. In the middle of their conversation she tells this child or mentally ill woman, “I like to get wet” which prompts the girl to bring her to a pool. The possessed lady then strips down to her bikini, looks into the camera as if she is in a porno film, which seems to be a weird theme for this movie, and the little girl joins her. She once again goes into the water but this time, instead of turning into a shark, she wakes up revealing that sequence with the little girl was all a dream. None of that had any barring on the story at all like many of the scenes coming up in this movie.
The rest of the movie is literally just random scenes with random new characters that have to effect on the story at all. These scenes include, three girls in a sorority in which the shark attacks the only girl that is not in the water, a female character we are never introduced to tanning while a stalker, which we are never introduced to as well, takes photos of her and reviews them while still hovering over her and a scene of yet another non-introduced male character jogging for literally five minutes until he finds a body of a dead girl in the water, throws up on himself and utters the words, “She is still kind of hot. I’ll still do her.” to a corpse. We also get a carnival date scene that inexplicably ends with the guy smushing the girl’s face. She gets sad and the guy leaves with the possessed girl who gets caught by the priest. The Priest then performs a failed exorcism in which she kisses him and a Shark falls through a portal in the sky and kills everyone. Once the credits start rolling you believe you are done with this atrociousness but you would be wrong. After the credits we get treated to two of the the most awkward post credit scenes that made no sense or add anything the film itself.
Shark Exorcist is the worst thing I have ever seen to this point. It takes a lot for me to completely dismiss a movie but this was not good at all. Nothing made sense and we get way too many random scenes that did not help the plot move forward at all. You cannot tell a cohesive story if you decide to introduce a new character in ever scene we get. The shooting and directing were horrible as well with way too many ducts angles and a constantly shanking camera as if they have never heard of a tripod. I actually would say to watch this movie at least once, especially if you are an aspiring film maker, so you know what a terribly filmed and written movie it really is.
