Trailer Park Shark has such a dopey sense of fun and a general goofiness about it that I couldn’t help but admire its chutzpah.
Oh, SyFy. Where would the sharksploitation sub-genre be without you? For a while, the channel pumped out one completely insane shark movie after another. Most of them are complete garbage with their concepts — usually given away in the title — being better than the actual movies. Occasionally, some of them, like Trailer Park Shark, aren’t a complete waste of time. That’s not to say that Trailer Park Shark is great movie but it has its moments.
Sleazy real estate developer Deconnard (Dennis Haskins) decides to rid one of his properties of squatters by flooding them out. Two of his cronies — Swayze (David Kalloway) and Bruno (Josh Whites) — are tasked with blasting a hole in a levy during a bad storm. The idea is to make the flood look like a naturally occurring disaster.
The squatters are made up of a collection of cliched, redneck stereotypes one might expect in a movie called Trailer Park Shark. Rob (Thomas Ian Nicholas, American Pie) serves as the film’s hero of sorts. Before the flood hits, he’s also the nice guy of the trailer park. Along with his Uncle Jeff (Ritchie Montgomery), Rob plans to provide the tenants with free electricity by hooking them all up to a wind turbine located nearby.
When a great white shark inexplicably appears — complete with the ability to swim in fresh water as well as the ability to deliver severe electric shocks — things are complicated for Deconnard as well as the surviving squatters.
As a tongue-in-cheek thriller, Trailer Park Shark succeeds by being blatantly over-the-top but humorously self-aware about it. The cast actually appears to be having fun and not just there for the paycheck like so many of these low budget genre films. Dennis Haskins, who viewers will probably recognize as Mr. Belding from TVs Saved by the Bell, makes for a deliciously evil villain. Tara Reid, who is a fixture in the Sharknado movies, shows up for an extended cameo.
As is typical with these cheap shark features, the shark effects border on abysmal. One shot of the CGI shark is reused multiple times. I lost count of the number of shots that feature a computer generated fin slicing through the water with no resulting wake. When the shark emerges from the water, things just look worse. The flooded trailer park set, though, is pretty impressive.
I’ve sat through a lot of these low-budget shark films and so many of them are joyless affairs with actors who clearly don’t want to be there and scripts that make little sense. Trailer Park Shark has such a dopey sense of fun and a general goofiness about it that I couldn’t help but admire its chutzpah. Great cinema this is not but it is good for a laugh or two.
2.5 out of 5.0 stars
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