I’d Rather Watch 6-Headed Shart Attack!!!
Main Cast: Brandon Auret, Thandi Sebe
Director: Mark Atkins
First there was JAWS. Then, after Chief Brody exploded the shark at the end of that movie, it grew back its head, along with a second head and we had 2-HEADED SHARK ATTACK (I might actually want to check my facts here, that could very well be inaccurate). Then we had 3-HEADED SHARK ATTACK. Then we somehow skipped the 4-headed shark and next were saddled with a 5-HEADED SHARK ATTACK. But that wasn’t enough, was it? We got greedy. We got masochistic and now we have the infamous, the vicious 6-HEADED SHARK ATTACK.
You read that right. This shark has SIX heads. And why not? If you could have 6 heads, wouldn’t you? You’d have to have 6 stomachs as well, because I don’t know about YOU, but for me personally, sometimes my ONE head eats more than my stomach can handle. And another question, if you have SIX heads and they’re all thirsty, because six heads means six throats bound to be parched at one time or another, can you imagine how much time would be spent in one day JUST peeing?
At 48, I do enough of that with just the one head.
But still, this is 6-HEADED SHARK ATTACK we’re talking about, and that demands respect.
You know what happens when you don’t respect a 6-headed shark? He’ll attack your marriage boot camp and start eating your clientele, and this is all BEFORE they’ve filled out their comment cards. You’ll be ruined. Your business will go under and the wife you’re trying to win back will almost definitely leave you to run your marriage boot camp all alone. And then the kicker. If you don’t respect a 6-headed shark, he’ll use four of those heads like legs and crawl out of the water to chase you across the beach.
Don’t believe me? Just try it. Try and disrespect a 6-headed shark and see what happens. But don’t say I didn’t warn you because I most definitely warned you. You respect a 6-headed shark.
Now, if you’d like to disrespect writer/director Mark Atkins (PLANET OF THE SHARKS, EMPIRE OF THE SHARKS, SAND SHARKS), by all means, please be my guest.
I’ve seen all of the multi-headed shark attack movies, including JAWS when it was just 1-HEADED SHARK ATTACK (note to self: check facts here before publishing), and this one is hands down the dumbest of them all. And I thought 5-HEADED SHARK ATTACK where it was really just four heads and the fifth head was in the tail was pretty bad. But there were no walking, head-regenerating sharks in that movie (I actually don’t remember if the 5-headed shark was able to regrow heads, but I’m pretty sure it never walked). And at least 5-HEADED SHARK ATTACK starred Chris Bruno who was in the Dead Zone TV series for 69 episodes. Not a HUGE credit, but I’d seen the first season, so I recognized him.
The cast of 6-HEADED SHARK ATTACK?
Remember the scene in the first TRANSFORMERS movie where Agent Simmons comes to the Witwicky house and tells the dad he’s from Sector 7 and the dad says “Never heard of it,” and Agent Simmons says, “Never will”?
That’s the entire cast of this movie. You’ve never heard of them, you’ve never seen them in anything else, and you NEVER will. And that’s just as well because looking at the cast, I’m reminded of another movie, the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version of Touch of Satan when the name Emby Mellay comes up on screen and one of bots says, “That’s not a name, that’s a bad Scrabble hand.”
Here are a few of the names. What words can you score with these letters?
Thandi Sebe. Naima Sebe. Tapiwa Musvosi. Hell, even the co-screenwriter: Koichi Petetsky (writer of the classics SINISTER MINISTER and MEGALODON). Ooh, ohh, I have a word: obscurity.
To be fair, these people have made more movies than I have and people can get onto their Hulu accounts at any time, click this movie up, and see their faces, which is something they can’t do with mine. I also have no aspirations to be an actor, so I’m fine with that.
But on at least two of these actors’ IMDB pages it says in black and white, “known for 6-Headed Shark Attack.”
My condolences.
Let’s take a moment to discuss the good and the bad of this movie. We’ll start with the good because it’s a much smaller list.
It’s terrible. Believe it or not, that IS a pro. As someone who has NO formal training in writing movie reviews, or has taken a single film class, all I have to go on with these reviews is my opinion which, in the grand scheme of things, means jack to anyone but my wife and kids, so I’m flying by the seat of my Marvel pajama pants here and just spilling a bunch of sarcasm all over the page. And that is SO much easier with bad movies. And this movie is definitely on that list.
So that’s good.
On the bad side (yes, that was the entire good side), there’s everything else.
The script is remedial, the acting is sketchy, and even the plot points are ambiguous at best. At one point one of the characters who probably had a name but I don’t care what it was but apparently she’s a meteorologist, says the coming storm is about to unleash a cyclone and they HAVE to take shelter on these floating platforms out in the water. Fifteen minutes later, she’s been eaten and the storm has been forgotten, if the sunny skies in the background are any indication.
In another scene it’s broad daylight, but five minutes later after they’ve climbed to the top of a lighthouse, it’s full dark outside. Well, out the top of the lighthouse, anyway. One level below it’s still daylight out. But once they get outside with the plan to bury some containers of something I’m assuming is highly combustible because the plan is to wait til the shark is on top of it and then shoot the canisters, it’s full dark again.
When the lighthouse explodes in a scene that can only be described as frigging AWESOMEly stupid, the two survivors swim back out to a boat (there is a CRAZY amount of swimming back and forth in this movie, for a film about a shark attack) while it’s dark. By the time they reach the boat, the sun is up. The boat wasn’t actually THAT far from shore, they should have been there in a minute, two minutes tops.
There was some very very incredibly vague attempt at explaining the 6-headed shark’s origins but … honestly a LOT of the dialogue was lost here to the way-too-loud score, but I have a feeling whatever the origin, it was just as stupid and nonsensical as the rest of the movie.
I don’t know why The Asylum keeps making these terrible shark-related movies (says the guy who has seen all of them), but I think if they’re going to keep pushing the boundaries and go for a 7-Headed Shark Attack, my only hope, as far as hope goes with these things, is that they hire a writer, a director, some actors, and some special effects people capable of making a CGI shark.
If they can handle that incredibly small list of tasks before filming, they’ll have a hit on their hands. And maybe that will be enough to wipe the memory of this one. 6-HEADED SHARK ATTACK is currently streaming on Hulu.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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