Shark Attack in the Mediterranean (2004)

Submitted by corwin on Thu, 2 Jul 2009 4:24pm

Ever since Jaws first left me with the sure knowledge that we are, in fact, going to need a bigger boat, I've loved shark attack movies (and books). Despite the fact that I know going in that most Jaws ripoffs are huge steaming piles, I still watch them. Occasionally, I am pleasantly surprised, as was the case with Samuel L. Jackson's motivation speech cut short by a surprisingly early death in Deep Blue Sea, but more often I am left with something that would find it difficult to compare favorably to Jaws: The Revenge.

Shark Attack in the Mediterranean, unfortunately, fell into the latter category.

This movie used the tried and true method of having shark attacks off a popular beach right before a holiday, combined with ruthless and unethical scientist using sharks to cure cancer, with a splash of a revenge-driven protagonist seeking vengeance against the shark that killed his wife. Top it off with the fact that the shark is a carcharodon megalodon brought back from extinction by the scientists in question, and you officially have stolen from too many movies to keep track of your random plot threads. And naturally, they couldn't stop there, so we have a budding love story between our protagonist and the good scientist helping him, as well as a sub-plot involving his willful daughter and her need to win a jetski race against one of the local girls. It all got really confused really fast.

Worst of all was the dubbing. This is a German made-for-TV movie, originally titled Hai-Alarm auf Mallorca. Since I was watching it via Netflix Instant Viewing, I didn't have the choice of listening to it in German with English subtitles. Instead, I was subjected to English dubbing worthy of a bad Hong Kong kung-fu movie from the '80s. The voice acting was absolutely terrible, few of the voices matched the characters in any way, and they consistently mispronouced the word "megalodon," which came to grate on my nerves after the tenth or fifteenth time. I came close to turning it off many times, but perservered through to the end. And I will always regret doing so.

In the end, I have to give this one 0.95 Bolls. It'd get closer to the elusive 1.0, but I'm not sure it would be quite as bad in the original German with subtitles for the German-impaired. But I'm not interested in finding out, nor do I recommend anyone else do so. If you want a Jaws ripoff, try the 1976 film Grizzly instead. Better yet, pop in the original Jaws itself, which is still awesome after all these years.