Director/Photography – David Worth, Screenplay – Scott Devine & William Hooke, Producers – Boaz Davidson, Danny Lerner & David Varod, Music – Bill Wandel, Special Effects Supervisor – Willie Botha, Production Design – George Costello. Production Company – Nu Image.
Cast
John Barrowman (Ben Carpenter), Jennifer McShane (Cataline ‘Cat’ Stone), Ryan Cutrona (Chuck Rampart), George Stanchev (Esai), Pavlin Kemilev (Porter), Ivo Tonchev (Ramirez), Harry Aneachkin (Tolley), Atanas Sriebrev (Friedman)
Plot
Ben Carpenter is the head of security for the Playa Del Rey Resort in Colima, Mexico. While diving for crabs, he discovers a large shark’s tooth embedded in an international communications cable on the ocean floor. He posts a picture of it online and this is found by palaeontologist Cataline Stone who travels to Mexico to investigate. The shark starts attacking people in the waters around the resort. Ben wants to kill the shark but Cat pushes for him not to, revealing that it is a prehistoric megalodon. As they try to stop it, the megalodon attacks their boat, leaving them stranded at sea.
Jaws (1975) was a massive success and created a body of imitators. By the 1990s, this had gravitated to a series of B-budget killer shark films. Shark Attack (1999) was one of these. These B-budget copies became reasonably numerous throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Most of them were fairly limited and circled around very similar plots, although you can see by the point of Shark Attack 3: Megalodon here they had started to incorporate the idea of the megalodon, a prehistoric shark, which may have existed up to a hundred feet in length. The idea of the megalodon began to bleed into B-budget films around this time, beginning with Megalodon (2002) and Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, which was released one month later.
Only a few years later, the B killer shark movie made its evolution into the Gonzo Killer Shark movie, beginning with Shark in Venice (2008). The megalodon film became incorporated into this soon after with The Asylum’s Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (2009), which led to several sequels. By this point, other filmmakers were climbing aboard the fad and coming up with all manner of deliberately ridiculous killer shark combinations. This peak of this was The Asylum’s bad movie hit Sharknado (2013), which led to a series of sequels and a host of other films competing to pile absurdities atop one another. (For a more detailed listing of these films see Killer Shark Movies).
Shark Attack was produced by Nu Image, a film studio founded by several former Cannon Films associates. Nu Image was mostly known in the 1990s for their action films and hits like The Expendables (2010) and sequels, along with a series of B monster movies and killer animals films during the 2000s. Shark Attack was evidently popular enough that it produced two sequels, both directed by David Worth, with Shark Attack 2 (2001) and Shark Attack 3: Megalodon. Despite being set in Mexico, the film was shot in Nu Image’s regular cut-price locales in Bulgaria. The first two films were largely forgotten a mere few years later but Shark Attack 3: Megalodon gained a viral notoriety as a Bad Movie hit.
John Barrowman and Jennifer McShane fight giant prehistoric sharksSubmersible vs giant shark
Shark Attack 3: Megalodon comes from the time when the killer shark film was still taking itself seriously. Thus it has a standard plot where a prehistoric shark has been revived and attacks a holiday resort. There are assorted familiar characters from the resort’s owner who is doing a standard Murray Hamilton to shadowy government agents of ill-defined purpose who are trying to impede things. The side of good is represented by Jennifer McShane, returning from the first film but playing a different role, and John Barrowman, a mere three years before gaining a great deal of fan attention as Captain Jack Harkness on the revival of tv’s Doctor Who (2005- ) and then being spun off as the lead in Torchwood (2006-11). Barrowman certainly has a handsome and assured appearance, smiles with perfect teeth and says “shit” a whole lot.
On the other hand, there are a good many prize bad movie moments. One of these is the scene where a shark chews its way into the below decks of the cabin cruiser and John Barrowman is forced to fight it off with a baseball bat while it makes noises like a barking dog. Some of the most entertainingly ridiculous of these scenes are the ones where the megalodon pops up and swallow speedboats and life rafts whole. These is conducted with some fairly crappy effects. The general feeling the film leaves you with is that after this point, the killer shark had to become a parody of itself.
Director David Worth had emerged as a cinematographer on adult films in the 1970s before finding work as director of photograhy for several Clint Eastwood films and a steady diet of action video releases in the 1980s. He has made a number of action films including Kickboxer (1989), Lady Dragon (1992) and American Tigers (1996). Worth has also made a number of other genre efforts with the likes of the post-holocaust film Warriors of the Lost World (1983), the serial killer thriller The Prophet’s Game (1999), the amnesia action film Time Lapse (2001), Shark Attack 2 (2001), the ghost story The House at the End of the Drive (2012) and the psycho film Hazard Jack (2014).
