News

As the poet Tracy Jordan once told Kenneth the Page, "Here's some advice I wish I would have got when I was your age: Live every week like it's Shark Week." The "30 Rock" legend was referring to the Discovery Channel's yearly celebration of all things shark, a programming event where they fill every hour of airtime with nature specials about the terribly toothy monsters. There are enough fictional movies about sharks, however, that you can easily live every single day like it's Shark Day.

If we're being honest, though, many shark movies are pretty bad. That's what made SyFy's "Sharknado" franchise so good -- at least for the first few movies. The franchise expertly skewered shark movies made on the cheap, celebrating questionable CGI as something to be cheered rather than jeered. Shark movie fans know that we have to put up with a garbage to find a gem.

Shark films throughout the years have become popular for their use of tense atmospheres, shocking moments, and the pure primal fear they evoke in audiences. Despite the best shark films like Jaws, which can dominate a genre, there are many lesser-known films about sharks that are equally engaging, unique, and frightening. The films employ varying techniques to convey the imminent danger that shark attacks present and make the audience identify with the characters involved. Making the moments presented come to life in a more realistic way.

Rather than being held back by classics like Jaws and The Meg, these films have found a way to inject new imagination into the Shark genre, combining innovative stories with scary, heart-pounding moments. Whether it's an attack during a planned mission, such as in Under Paris, or a romantic folk tale about shark fishing in Mexico, like Tiburoneros, films about sharks have a way of captivating the audience.

While the math is way off – there’s no more than one hundred, tops – The Night of a Thousand Cats (1972) offers 63 minutes (!) of outlandish fun, decadent behavior, and a proclivity towards the absurd. Just don’t expect a story from this Mexican release; it seems around thirty minutes were cut for the North American release, leaving behind a mess of the rest that is nevertheless very entertaining.

Released in Mexico in early August, Cats didn’t arrive stateside until November of ’74, where it came and went pretty quickly. Reviews were…well, what do you think? There still really hasn’t been a reconsideration of the film all these years later; it remains hanging out just below the surface of modern horror culture.

And by hanging out I mean mostly hiding from shame; Night has a couple moments where cats appear to be mishandled, and I’m pretty sure there weren...

Reviewed by Kevin Scott

MoreHorror.com

Nymph (2014)

Written by: Marko Backovic, Barry Keating, Milan Konjevic

Directed by: Milan Todorovic

Cast: Kristina Klebe (Kelly), Franco Nero (Niko), Natalie Burn (Lucy), Dragan Micanovic (Boban), Slobodan Stefanovic (Alex), Miodrag Krstovic (The Guardian), Sofija Rajovic (Yasmine)

As you can see from the very challenging names to spell in the cast, this film has an international flair. Some scenes were filmed in Montenegro and some in Serbia. As of this writing, this film is streaming on Netflix under the title “Killer Mermaid”. I tend to gravitate more towards “Nymph”, the films’ original title. It leaves a little more mystique and still lets the film hold on to that exotic flair I eluded to earlier.

If anyone remembers “She Creature”, it involved a killer mermaid as well. That’s the only other film that I know of that can be compared to this one. I liked it a lot,...