DINOSHARK

WHAT A DELIGHT THIS MOVIE WAS!  This is a 2010 release, with a cast of sexy women in bikinis and toothsome men with Don Johnson beard stubble.  The only one I recognized besides Eric Balfour (I first saw him in Skyline) was Roger Corman, who was also the producer.  There is only one DINOSHARK in this picture, but rest assured, ladies -- she's a dilly. 

When this arrived in my P.O. box -- if we had my mail delivered to the front door of the Manoogian Mansion, surely our cover would be blown -- I eagerly tore it open and saw three of the most welcome words possible on the cover of the disc box:  ROGER CORMAN PRESENTS!  Imagine my delight when Corman turned out also to appear in this film.  Does it get any better than this? 

PLOT SUMMARY:  A glacier calves in the frozen North, and we see a number of fishlike shapes breaking themselves off the new iceberg and swimming away.  Nearby, a diver is checking the hull of his boat off the coast of Alaska and is rather suddenly recruited for Dagon.  The last thing we see is something BIG and TOOTHY swallowing his emergency beacon.  Meanwhile, a beach bum named Trace, having fallen on hard times in the United States, returns to Puerto Vallarta to resume running some sort of shady charter-boat business.  IMMEDIATELY people start disappearing into the sea, as an immense, spiny operative  -- who looks like nothing so much as a cross between a  Great White and an Ankylosaurus -- puts the munch on one swimmer after another.  WILL ANYONE SURVIVE?   

CLIFFIE'S NOTES ON THIS SHARKTACULAR MOVIE:

>> Luckily, everyone in this version of Mexico speaks fluent, unaccented English.  You can only really tell you're in Mexico because everywhere you look, there are people in these immense sombreros, dancing colorful native dances or playing guitars and singing colorful native songs.  I'm serious about the hats, man; they would look oversized even if the DINOSHARK wore them.

>>  Luckily, this movie conforms to the odd little unwritten rule for human-made TV and movies:  everyone has a job, but nobody ever actually works.  Therefore, Trace, his friend Luis the bartender, and their new acquaintance Carol -- who is some sort of biologist who coaches a women's water-polo team -- have UNLIMITED TIME to hunt down the toothy menace.

>> Luckily, the DINOSHARK keeps them very busy.  There is no lull in the story for dumb stuff like character development or exposition.  Someone is getting recruited for Dagon in just about every scene.

>>  Luckily, Trace is not only totally unable to find any work to do, but he is also ARMED TO THE TEETH.  I've never seen a gun like the one he has under the seat cushion of his boat.  Jesus, you could blow up the sun with that thing.

>> Luckily, Roger Corman HIMSELF is on the job in this movie, looking at the DINOSHARK poop scraped off the emergency beacon shat out at one of the death scenes.  Like most brilliant scientists in movies like these, he spends the whole movie squinting in a worried fashion through a microscope lens.  He can identify the alien cells at a glance as being from a DINOSHARK, but what does he do about it?  Well, nothing.  Ever.

>> Did I mention the women's water-polo team?  Luckily,  not one of them dared put her face in the water even once in the course of this film, and they thrashed in the water like drowning squirrels.  This made them easier for the camera to spot, and easier to bite and swallow as the DINOSHARK closed in to eat them.  They were almost my favorite part of this film.

>> One thing I really love about the DINOSHARK is the way she jumps gaily out of the water after eating someone.  She also flings herself out of the water as she's preparing to sink a boat, by crashing down onto it mouth-first, so the whole schmeer is bitten in two and swallowed -- lost with all hands.  Yes! 

>> Luckily, the local security force is hopeless.  They go out and the DINOSHARK eats the boat immediately.  Nobody is sent out to see what became of them.  This allows Trace, Carol and Luis to face the menace on their own, in a boat that must have been sprayed with DINOSHARK repellent.

I have to say I loved this one.  I plan to submit a request to R&D to start working on developing a prototype DINOSHARK.  This idea is just too good to pass up.