Directors/Screenplay/Producers – Justin Shilton & Rob Zazzali, Photography – Justin Shilton. Production Company – Swim Swim Entertainment.
Cast
Alexandra Corin Johnston (Heidi Freeling), Sumayyah Ameerah (Sienna Rogen), Nick Tag (Christopher Bellman), Ryan Betroche (Ron), Brian Guest (Professor Rick Tavern), Rob Zazzali (Truth Jedi), John Griffin (Shelby), Devon Odessa (Jackie Pierson), Delaney Hogan (Gina G), Randolph Summiel (Sam), Elle Chapman (Ashley), Patrick Luwis (Kevin), Scott Connors (Shinzo), Gabrielle Montes de Oca (Cayden)
Plot
The social media influencer Heidi is modelling at Venice Beach. Entering into the water, she is bitten by a shark that has been infected with waste from a nearby nuclear power plant. This causes Heidi to mutate into a human-shark hybrid. She begins attacking and devouring people. As the bodies pile up, Christopher, a vlogger who also happens to be a school friend of Heidi’s, and her best friend Sienna, a marine biologist who arrives in town to investigate, team up to find what is happening and are shocked to find that the shark girl is none other than Heidi.
The killer shark film began with Jaws (1975), which produced B-budget copies for a number of years. By the 2010s, this had evolved towards the Gonzo Killer Shark film. This began with Shark in Venice (2008) and especially Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (2009), which increasingly placed tongue-in-cheek and began to mix sharks with the most ridiculous things possible or create shark-related title puns. This reached its zenith with the bad movie hit of Sharknado (2013) and sequels.
Shark Girl seems to float around unsure of quite what sort of film it is being. It wants to be a Gonzo Killer Shark film but it is being made on such a low-budget that there are no actual sharks in the film. All we get is Alexandra Corin Johnston who we are told has been bitten by a mutated shark and is now a shark-human hybrid. Shark Girl also wants to tap the whole social media influencer fad of the moment. It also wants to cast Alexandra as a woman avenging herself against jerks and abusers in the workplace who treat her like dogshit, but then confusingly switches in mid-film and has her as a murdering monster that needs to be eliminated.
The film toys around with the idea of the shark girl as being a social media influencer. There is an intriguing metaphor in there somewhere that makes analogies between sharks and social media influencers (surely one of the most empty-headed positions in the world), but the film does not pursue this. It also seems to have a peculiar idea about what a social media influencer actually does – Alexandra Corin Johnston seems more like a regular model rather than an actual influencer.
Alexandra Corin Johnston as the Shark Girl
One area the film does quite well in is in terms of the performances. Alexandra Corin Johnston seems a little out of it when playing normal but does have some fierce poses when she becomes the shark girl. The best of the performances comes from Sumayyah Ameerah who is warm and confident and is someone you could easily see going on to a career as a mainstream actress.
Directors Justin Shilton and Rob Zazzali give us quite a bit of girls running around in bikinis and posing, although this is material that is stuck at being PG-13 line even if it tiptoes up to but never crosses the R-rating line. This is the sort of film where going over that line would be regarded as a bonus so you are not quite sure why.
Shark Girl isn’t an awful film. It is a fairly average B movie. The budget does get in the way of greater ambition – the lack of any shark, while a climactic fight takes place in somebody’s back yard – but it is slickly edited and moves at a snappy pace that glides over many of these deficiencies. The ending has been left open for a sequel.
The film was a directorial debut for Justin Shilton and Rob Zazzali. Shilton has a number of credits as an actor in works like The Aviator (2004) and Little Miss Sunshine (2006), among other. Zazzali has mostly worked as a producer on reality tv shows.
