Shark Hunter

Low budget movie about a giant shark. It really seems that Spielberg's JAWS (1975) made quite an impression on the world. SHARK HUNTER is just another film from an entire genre in the shadow of JAWS. Antonio Sabato Jr. stars as some sort of marine biologist hell bent on proving that his parents were killed by a prehistoric megalodon shark. Next thing you know he's at the bottom of the ocean with an experimental navy sub (crew included) fighting the twenty ton shark. Blah blah blah and loopholes so big, the shark could swim through them. However, no one is watching this type of movie for the story line...or even the acting. You are watching it for the killer shark.

Every scene of this film with the sixty-foot long shark is computer-generated and it looks like the movie's budget went into these effects. And it surprisingly pays off. They did a pretty damn good job. The CG shots look better than the majority of scenes with CG sharks in Renny Harlin's DEEP BLUE SEA (1999).

The only disappointment for me in this film were the shark attacks. The shark is so big that it can easily swallow a mini-sub (as shown in the movie). My point is that the shark is to big to attack people.

The highlight of SHARK HUNTER, for me, was the ending. It took me by surprise...really unexpected.

In conclusion, this is a really bad movie. However, if you love killer shark movies and have seen JAWS one too many times, this one's for you.

I got to see Antonio Sabato, Jr. fresh from his appearance at the Republican convention in this film. It should better be titled Shark Destroyer because that's the mission Sabato is on.

You can't really blame him, this prehistoric sixty foot Megladon survivor took his parents from him. Since then Sabato has become an oceanographer, but all that was training the subduing of his particular white whale.

After another couple of incidents where this big guy did some serious damage, the last incident to an underwater laboratory, Sabato gets assigned to a submarine where the people there are divided between capturing and killing the big shark. Of course Sabato wants to kill it, but Heather Marie Marsden wants to take it alive.

This is a plot we've seen a lot of, most especially in the first version of The Thing. Marsden also a scientist sounds a whole lot like scientist Robert Cornthwaite from that much better film.

Think of Moby Dick when you see this. With the script most definitely not written by Herman Melville.

The better of the giant Shark films. Compared to Megalodon (2002) and Shark Attack 3: Megalodon (2002), Shark Hunter is almost Oscar material when it comes to acting and script. Although it suffers with a low budget and shamelessly borrows elements from Steve Alten's novel 'Meg' it's the closet thing you'll get to an attempted prehistoric shark film.

The pacing and editing are a little awry but some of the practical and special effects are well executed.

Die Hard actor Grand L. Bush and hammy Antonio Sabato Jr. for the most part are watchable. Director Matt Codd is wise to hide to shark in the shadows and considering it was made in 2001 the SPFX are adequate. The music score is worthy of note and it has a nihilistic element that breaks the b-film mould with and ending that refreshingly going against the norm.

Overall, it's far from great but the best Megalodon film to date.

I saw this in the video store, placed right next to "Shark Attack III," which also deals with a Megalodon. I'm a big fan of Megs, having read Steve Alten's book "Meg" and the sequel. Although I had read the horrible reviews on Shark Attack II and seen the first Shark Attack movie, and imagined it would be as god awful as those. I was actually pretty surprised. Despite Antonio Sabato Jr in the lead role, the acting was fairly decent for this type of movie. The special effects were very well done, and the shark was very realistic, along with the sub. The plot was pretty typical of some of the TBS-made movies you see a lot of, but I rented it more for the action.

I had read some decent reviews of this movie and decided to give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised. The scenes with the shark were realistic and there was a lot of action. The ending to the film could have been more upbeat, but overall it was fairly entertaining.

Having switched over to late night Sky Movies, I thought this was just going to be another rubbishy clone movie that I could switch my brain off to, then it turned out to be the completely opposite. The tense bits were tense, the special effects were very good for a "hmm, never saw 'that' one at the movies" movie, and the acting was OK. My only complaints with it were plot wise, the crew seemed to very quickly jump into plan to capture a giant monster that none of them believed existed in the first place, and the investigation of the research centre to which they were sent to 'investigate', encompassed nothing more than cursory glance and the extraction of a Shark tooth from the side of a wall. The ending was also a bit, well... unsatisfactory. Other than that, it held my attention and is a very worthy "Aaah, giant Shark" movie.