Shark Attack (1999)
** (out of 4)
A marine biologist played by Casper Van Dien (yeah, I know) goes to Port Amanzi Africa after his best friend is mysteriously eaten by a shark. It turns out that shark attacks are up all over the region so Mr. Van Dien must find out the cause and it turns out that a greedy real estate owner (Ernie Hudson) is having sharks eat people so that he can buy up all their land. Sounds plausible, right? If you walk into this movie and are willing to turn your brain off then you might get some mild entertainment out of it but if you're one who needs to take everything serious then it's best to stay away from this thing. This is certainly a bad movie and it's the cheese factor that gives it some unintentional laughs and a lot of them come from Van Dien's performance. He's certainly not very believable in the role. You know how in a great performance the actor can make you believe everything they're saying? Well, in this film it was very hard to believe that Van Dien knew anything that was coming out of his mouth and the viewer can tell this. That's part of the reason for the laughs but another is because his character comes off like some sort of ancient gladiator. There are a couple scenes in the film where people are getting attacked by sharks and the brave Van Dien just jumps into the water, swims over to the shark and takes care of the situation. I'm no shark expert but I've seen Shark Week on Discovery enough to know that you don't go messing with a shark during a feeding frenzy. The majority of the shark scenes are obviously just stock footage taken from real sharks. It's obvious because each time we see the "main" shark it's different in size than the previous time we saw it. The attack scenes are also rather cheap.
