Baddie – Greed. Also, alcohol.

Lesson – Once again, I really must repeat – Spring Break trips are a terrible idea.

Well, that’s it. I was getting SO SICK of the fanmail.

“SciFridays, why no movies that take place in the bayou?”

Bullet Films
Swamp Shark on Amazon

FINE. I’ll do it. I’ll review a movie that takes place in the gosh darned bayou.

What’s that? I have done this in the past? How many times…? This is the 5th? Fantastic.

In either case, “Swamp Shark” is actually an entertaining romp through the swamp set to a sweet zydeco/Rockabilly/’Firefly’ soundtrack. (I never planned on writing positive things about zydeco. But here we are.)

Incidentally, “Terror has a new home” is a terrible tagline that has almost literally nothing to do with the film, other than that it’s about a shark who gets homesick because someone put him in a swamp. So he stress eats. I do the same thing when I get homesick. However, as close friends of mine already know because I am relentless, the thing that attracted me to this film was the verbal tagline from the original trailer.

“Swamp shark. It’s not like other sharks. It swims. It kills.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but…I’m pretty sure most sharks swim and kill for a living.

Now, this movie is fun for a few reasons. Firstly, like most B-movies, it has some fun people in it. Robert Davi, for instance, who you might recognize as ‘the bad guy’ in everything from “The Goonies” to “Licence to Kill”.  Additionally, Sophia Sinise, who is the daughter of Gary Sinise, who is the ‘star’ of the ‘vastly popular’ show C.S.I. New York. In either way, she kinda looks like if Emma Stone and Hillary Duff had a baby, so, there’s that.

This movie was produced by someone with the last name Badish. Appropriately, this movie is bad…ish. It suffers the same fate as a lot of recent B-movies these days. They embrace the low-budget rushed quality, and it lacks some genuine feeling. The shark is underdeveloped, and not terribly scary.

Bullet Films
It’s right behind me, isn’t it.

HOWEVER, this movie did something that not a lot of films can do. It made me laugh out loud. By myself, in my studio apartment, I laughed. Heartily, in fact. Once. That’s because “Swamp Shark” is also a tribute movie. I would like SyFy to stop making tribute movies. Realistically you only need a couple. Now, “Swamp Shark” is a tribute movie in some cute and clever ways, one of which made me laugh out loud. It might be a fun game to play ‘what movie are they referencing’? For instance,

“If it breathes, it can be killed.”

(Answer: Predator)

There is a nagging question I have…and since it happens early on, I don’t mind spoiling it. After the first death, our heroine literally wakes in a cold sweat, bolts from her bed, grabs a gun and heads for the docks in the earliest documented case of…shark sense.

Also, the death scene is pretty fantastic, I have to say. Almost ‘Jaws gets impaled on a huge sailboat’ good (“Jaws 3”). Maybe better.