SNOW SHARK

WHAT CAN I POSSIBLY SAY ABOUT THIS MOVIE SHARKTACULAR???

Well, let's start with the basics...It's a 2011 release, written and directed by Sam Qualiana and pretty much starring himself, his neighbors and his relatives.  For instance, C.J. Qualiana features as the beleaguered sheriff, and Ben, Kathy and Simeon Qualiana can be seen muttering darkly among the good people at the town hall meeting.   I daresay a lot of non-Qualianas in the cast and crew were cousins and stuff from the other side of the family...

But the real star of this show is the SNOW SHARK.  I have to tell you, THIS IS THE GREATEST IDEA A HOMO SAPIENS HAS EVER HAD ABOUT OUR CARTILAGINOUS SISTERS.  Sam Q. doesn't give the time of day to blame fool ideas about evolution or scientifically-proven features of piscatorial biology -- you know, like the fact that Sharks live in water.  He even scoffs at the laws of physics.  He just came up with a 15-foot Great White that swims through the snow, or maybe underground, but apparently only when the ground is frozen.  Yeah, it hibernates during WARM weather. This is a feat of bizarreness far outstripping the Horta in the "Devil In The Dark" episode of Star Trek.  Remember, the creature that moved through rock the way we move through the air?  Gene Roddenberry got that idea to work.  The idea in this movie does not fly at all.  It...SWIMS.  In the SNOW.

There is no way not to enjoy the ragtag group that first encounters the SNOW SHARK by accident.  It's the sort of scientific expedition you hardly ever get to see these days.  Professor Jonathan Hoffman, half of the bifurcated Captain Quint character in this movie, seeing a moving object in the snow he can't quite merit at the beginning of the movie and hearing a nutty rumor about "something in the snow in these parts" that kills, immediately realizes that the recent earthquake must have waked up an unknown species from the Cretaceous Period -- not the Jurassic or the Devonian, gosh darn it, the Cretaceous -- and is eating all the local wildlife.  He doesn't THINK this.  He doesn't SPECULATE.  He KNOWS.  Remember when Worm Guy from Fraudzilla took one look at the monster from a thousand yards away -- a creature that strongly resembles a microcephalic, carnivorous dinosaur --  and declared it an obvious case of an animal that reproduces asexually?  Hoffman makes Worm Guy look like, well, a scientist.

You also have to like the way Hoffman and his assistants stand puzzling over a pool of blood in the snow with two deer's feet, a deer's tail and a deer's head sticking up in the air -- plus a sadly misplaced raccoon's hindquarters.  The professor holds his tape recorder to his lips and says uncertainly that he...THINKS...it's a deer.  This is supposed to be an expert in the environmental sciences.

Sam Qualiana inexplicably skipped over the usual wrangling about whether or not to close the woods to hikers and hunters.  Everyone believes the legend of the Snow Shark and stays the funk away from there... But all the precautions are FOR NAUGHT as the killer Shark moves in on a hot tub full of heavily tattooed, pink-haired body jewelry models in their own back yard.  Then some kids drinking dad's beer on the sly, out by the burn barrel.  Next, a guy in the parking lot of his downtown business.

So the sheriff -- whose be-munched son was one of the kids out by the burn barrel -- calls in some reinforcements.  There's a pretty blonde animal biologist who wears puffy sleeves out into the woods to hunt for killer sharks; a queerly over-intense cryptozoologist, wearing thin khakis and a necktie out into the snowy wilderness; and the other half of the Captain Quint duo.  This guy wears beard stubble and a bush hat, and carries a pearl-handled revolver, a 9mm Glock, a machete and a crossbow to dispatch the menace.  WILL ANYONE SURVIVE?

CLIFFIE'S NOTES:

>> This is about what you can expect these days in terms of human scientific know-how. IT GIVES ME HOPE FOR THE FUTURE, LADIES.  Even logic, supposedly the precious jewel of human intellogence, is left behind in the bloody snow.

>> Even when I was a human I hated Santa Claus, and it gave me great pleasure to see how he bought it in this picture.

>> They never solve the mystery of how there can possibly be such a thing as a SNOW SHARK.  It's just there and it eats you if you go out in the woods.  I don't think anyone even asked, did they?

>> This movie strongly reminds me of that Jaws ripoff called Trees -- remember the one about the killer Christmas trees?  Somehow it had the same feel to it, and even the actors looked very similar.  Not to mention the nondescript little town where it all takes place.

>> The ending is happy, but I won't give it away.

You have to see this one.  It shows that WE ARE WINNING.