Director – Sheldon Wilson, Screenplay – Richard Beattie & Sheldon Wilson, Producers – Lance Samuels & Mary Anne Waterhouse, Photography – Trevor Calverley, Music – Mark Kilian, Visual Effects Supervisor – Brett Keyes, Visual Effects – The VFX Cloud, Special Effects Supervisor – Antony Stone, Production Design – Brian Glaser. Production Company – Blue Ice Pictures/Shark Killer Productions Inc/Out of Africa Entertainment.
Cast
Derek Theler (Chase Walker), Erica Cerra (Jasmine), Paul du Toit (Jake), Arnold Vosloo (Nix), Neels van Jaarsveld (Biggs), Henie Bosman (Clambone), Wayne Harrison (Mayor), Ashleigh van der Hoven (Cindy), Joseph Mitchell (Motel Clerk)
Plot
Shark hunter Chase Walker is hired by Jasmine to go to Cape Town. Upon arriving, Chase finds that he has been brought there by his adopted brother Jake who runs a private security firm. Jake wants Chase to hunt down a shark with a black fin that has devoured a valuable diamond that belonged to him. Aided by Jasmine, Chase heads out onto the water to hunt the black-finned shark. He then that he finds himself caught between Jake and the local druglord Nix who also claims ownership of the diamond and wants Chase to procure it for him.
The killer shark film has become a genre unto itself in the 2010s. It began all the way back with Jaws (1975), which was followed by a host of sequels and low-budget copycats. However, the late 2000s brought entries such as Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (2009) and Sharknado (2013), which took the genre in a series of deliberately ridiculous directions. (See Killer Sharks for a full listing of these).
Sheldon Wilson is a director whose name has turned up here regularly. Wilson has become a director who, despite working in low-budget genre material, has proven a consistently interesting in his output. Wilson first appeared with the low-budget horror film Shallow Ground (2004) and has since churned out a string of genre films that have mostly found play on cable tv with the likes of Kaw (2007), Carny (2009), Screamers: The Hunting (2009), Mothman (2010), Red: Werewolf Hunter (2010), Killer Mountain (2011), Snowmageddon (2011), Cold Spring (2013), Scarecrow (2013), The Hollow (2015), The Unspoken (2015), The Night Before Halloween (2016), Stickman (2017), Dead in the Water (2018) and Believer (2024)
Sheldon Wilson has made some decent medium budget films, but Shark Killer feels like routine filler. It was produced by Blue Ice Pictures and Out of Africa Entertainment, who have offices between Canada and South Africa. Soon into the show, the film soon relocates the action to Cape Town, while a number of South Africans actors feature in the cast.
(l to r) Erica Cerra, Derek Theler and Paul du Toit go shark hunting
That said, Shark Killer also has the feel of a film trying to jump the killer shark bandwagon without having much studied it. By 2015, most of the killer shark films were trying to copy Sharknado and offer up deliberately ridiculous takes, whereas this is one of the few shark films of this era to play itself straight. What you expect it to do is join the shark survival horror film that was starting to grow around this time with films like Open Water (2003), The Reef (2010) and The Shallows (2016) – only it doesn’t belong among these either.
Shark Killer’s biggest disappointment is when it comes to the shark. The film suffers from some not great underwater photography. In fact, there is never much shark present at all and it is never build into the lurking menace that it is in most shark films. What we have is more of an adventure film about seeking a diamond that has been swallowed by the shark, with the hero caught between rival criminal gangs. Even then the script seems woefully ignorant about basic shark biology – if a shark swallows a diamond, it is not going to stay around in its stomach, the same is going to happen that would if you swallowed a diamond and that is that it would go through the digestive track and out the other end and now probably be lying somewhere on the ocean floor in a pile of shark poop.
The film is also lumbered with its leading man, Derek Theler, a former male model who certainly comes with an impressive 6’5” physique. However, Theler plays the part as a jerk. The supposedly cocky banter and the ongoing repartee between he and Erica Cerra just becomes smug and annoying. The character is also burdened with a preposterous quirk for someone who is supposedly a shark hunter – he absolutely hates the ocean to the extent he even insists on a hotel room without a view of it. On the plus side, an underused Arnold Vosloo (an actual South African actor) reveals he would have the makings of a great James Bond super-villain.
