This is Post 1 of 4 this afternoon.

We begin with wishes to all MonSFFen, their families, and the club’s friends for a very Merry Christmas, a Joyful Holiday season, and a Happy New Year!

INTRODUCTION

Note that we’ll be chatting on ZOOM for the next few hours and, with no formal programming scheduled, rerunning on this site a few of our best Holiday presentations, resurrected from MonSFFA’s very first online Christmas e-gathering of December 2020. Think of this as our take on the broadcasting of perennial Holiday specials, not on TV, but right here on the club’s Web site!

You may recall that in December 2020, with infections rising and vaccines still months away, we were about to head into lockdown, just as the Holiday season was getting underway. And worse was to come before things would begin to turn around, although we’ve been at this for almost three years, and we’re still not completely back to normal!

But let’s focus on the positive; this afternoon is about MonSFFA club members and friends-in-fandom getting together online to celebrate the season. So let’s get right to it!

JOIN THIS AFTERNOON’S ZOOM-CHAT!

Here’s how to join our ZOOM-chat today: just click here and follow the prompts: This Afternoon’s MonSFFA e-Meeting on ZOOM

If you’re not fully equipped to ZOOM by computer, you can also join in by phone (voice only); in the Montreal area, the toll-free number to call is: 1-438-809-7799. If you’re from out of town, find your Zoom call-in number here: International Call-In Numbers

Also, have this information on hand as you may be asked to enter it:

Meeting ID: 899 4439 2961
Passcode: 611313

As we gather online again this Holiday season, we remind local members that the club is also hosting an in-person Christmas Luncheon next Saturday, December 10. More about that later, but this afternoon, we’ll be putting up posts every hour until 4:00PM. So we’re pretty much all ZOOM today; do pop in and join the conversation.

All posts will also be available concurrently on MonSFFA’s Facebook page (www.facebook.com/MonSFFA), however, note that the interface best suited for taking in this meeting is this very Web site.

Up first, we present again club vice-president Keith Braithwaite’s list of perennial Holiday Favourites on Screen, followed by a reworked and updated Trivia Challenge for the Festive Season:

HOLIDAY FAVOURITES ON SCREEN: KEITH’S LIST OF MUST-SEE VIEWING FOR THE SEASON!

Countless Christmas movies and television specials have been produced over the decades, with fresh installments added every year. There are far too many to watch over the typical Holiday season. Anyway, most of them can be classified employing Sturgeon’s Law! But there are those few that bear repeated viewing, year after year, never ceasing to stir in one sentimental feelings entirely apt for this most wonderful time of the year. We all have our favourites, some fondly remembered from childhood, others more recent.

In my case, there a handful that I absolutely must watch each December. They are, in my humble opinion, unrivaled classics that help spark in me annually something that I suppose must be the Christmas spirit. They warm my heart, bring a smile, elicit joy, and get me all fired up for tree trimming and gift wrapping and Christmas baking and all the other fabulous things associated with the festive season that I so enjoy.

Here’s my list, in no particular order:

 It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)—A perennial favourite on TV at Christmastime, this is the story of George Bailey, a fundamentally good and decent man who has always put his own lofty ambitions aside to accommodate his family and friends, all of this outlined in flashback through the first half of the film. Then Bailey finds that his small-town building and loan business is suddenly short $8000 on Christmas Eve! Scandal, ruin, and shame vested upon his wife and children are sure to follow, he fears, and despairing, he opts for suicide, convinced that his family and friends would be better off without him. His guardian angel is dispatched from Heaven to save the man. The pacing is, perhaps, a little too relaxed for modern audiences but stick with it and you will be rewarded with a heart-warming, life-affirming, lightly comedic, part romance, part drama, and part science fiction movie. You read that right: science fiction! For in a chilling, noire-ish alternate-universe sequence, the angel seeks to show Bailey just how valuable a gift is life, allowing him to see how things would have played out for his family and friends had he never been born.

A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)—Peanuts was a favourite comic strip of mine growing up, so that probably plays a part in influencing my opinion of this simple, sincere, funny, moving, and endearing cartoon. In later years I came to appreciate the unassuming yet arresting artwork paired so beautifully with Vince Guaraldi’s outstanding jazz score and his unorthodox take on traditional Christmas music. Commentary on the rampant commercialization of Christmas is deftly handled with humour so as not to come across as too preachy. And when Charlie Brown asks in exasperation if there’s anyone who knows what Christmas is all about, Linus steps up with a wisdom beyond his years, making for a marvellously memorable moment.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)—The other animated Holiday special that is an annual must-see in our house brings to life the wacky world of Dr. Suess in vibrant colour. This is the enchanting tale of the dour Grinch’s emotional journey from wretched recluse and hater of all things Christmas to epiphany and jubilant embrace of the whole thing! Like A Charlie Brown Christmas, there’s an anti-consumerist message, here, avowing that Christmas “doesn’t come from a store,” but that it “means a little bit more.”

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964)— Ludicrous plots, inane dialogue, stilted acting, ridiculously amateurish sets, costumes, and special effects, all on a dollar-store budget! If you enjoy cheap, low-rent flicks like Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) or Robot Monster (1953), you’ll be thrilled to know that there exists such a so-bad-it’s-good movie for the festive season! Santa Claus and a couple of Earth children are kidnapped by Martians and brought to the red planet, whose leader seeks to bring Mars’ melancholy youth out of their doldrums. And thus does Santa Claus “conquer” his captors not with arms, but with the spirit of Christmas.

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)—The movies of my parents’ generation frequently aired on television when I was a youngster, affording me the opportunity to enjoy seasonal classics like this one, the light-hearted tale of a white-bearded old fellow named Kris Kringle, hired as a department store Santa Claus at Macy’s in New York City, who claims to be the real thing! A young Natalie Wood plays a little girl whose mother has brought her up to rebuff fanciful fairy tales of Santa Claus and the like, but over the course of the film, she comes to believe that the old man really is who he says he is, and so regains her lost childhood innocence. Her mother and the other adults at Macy’s are not quite so sure but they, too, eventually begin to come around. The centerpiece of the story is the court hearing instigated to determine if Mr. Kringle is, in fact, the one and only Santa Claus, as he claims, or is mentally ill and in need of hospitalization. His sympathetic lawyer is the mother’s romantic interest and there’s a love story playing out, here, as the principal plot unfolds. This is a feel-good film if ever there was one!

Die Hard (1988)—An office Christmas party, garlands and decorations hung about, eggnog, hostages, gunfire, anti-tank missiles, explosions, and John McClane versus Hans Gruber! Must be Christmas at Nakatomi Plaza. A solid action movie that has been adopted by fans as a modern Holiday delight. Yippee-ki-yay!

King Kong (2005)—Peter Jackson’s magnificent remake includes a scene of Kong and Ann cavorting on a frozen pond in New York City’s Central Park at Christmastime, which is enough to justify a viewing and permit me to get my Kong on!

I SAW MOMMY QUIZZING SANTA CLAUS: A REWORKED AND UPDATED TRIVIA CHALLENGE FOR THE FESTIVE SEASON

Christmas movies and television specials are not generally considered SF/F, but any story centered on a jolly old elf capable of hitting every household on the planet to deliver so many gifts in one night has got to be rocking some kind of time-altering technology, right? Sounds sci-fi to us! And magical creatures like flying reindeer and snowmen come to life by means of an old silk hat must certainly be categorized under the fantasy heading!

Many sci-fi television series have featured episodes that play on Holiday themes, from The Twilight Zone (“Night of the Meek,” “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” among others) and animated Batman (“Christmas with the Joker,” “Holiday Knights”) to Quantum Leap (“A Little Miracle,” “Promised Land,”) and Doctor Who (“The Christmas Invasion,” “A Christmas Carol,” “Last Christmas,” to name a few)!

Test your knowledge of Christmas and Holiday films, TV specials, and things festive with this sci-fi flavoured trivia challenge, which we’ve reworked from the original we posted as part of our 2020 Holiday e-Meeting, with a number of new questions also added. Answers will be provided in our closing Post 4 of 4 at 4:00PM this afternoon. Good luck!

1) In the atrociously bad 1964 “Yuletide science fiction fantasy” Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, what are the names of the two Earth children kidnapped by the Martians?

2) 1978’s Star Wars Holiday Special included an animated sequence entitled “The Faithful Wookiee,” which introduced a new character to Star Wars canon, bounty hunter Boba Fett. Name the Canadian animation studio that George Lucas enlisted to produce this “Faithful Wookiee” cartoon.

3) Rankin/Bass’ 1964 stop-motion animated Christmas classic, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, was filmed in Japan under the direction of animation supervisor Tadahito “Tad” Mochinaga. The voice work and songs, however, were recorded elsewhere; where was the show’s soundtrack recorded?

4) What is the clever postal code created by Canada Post for the North Pole?

5) The Big Heart, My Heart Tells Me, and It’s Only Human—these were working titles for which classic Christmas film?

6) Name the only three Christmas movies to have been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

7) How many ghosts appear to surly Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol?

8) What is briefly visible on Katrina “Kate” Andrich’s wrist as she rides her father’s cab home in the fantasy/rom-com Last Christmas (2019)?

9) He famously voiced an animated space hero, she made her mark as a scream queen; name these two actors, and the 2004 Christmas movie in which they star.

10) What former “James Bond” starred as the bishop in Christmas classic The Bishop’s Wife?

11) What child actress was featured as a young family member in two back-to-back classic Christmas films?

12) What is notable about supporting player Alvin Greenman, who portrayed young Macy’s Department Store janitor Alfred in the original Miracle on 34th Street?

13) In the Lost in Space episode “Return From Outer Space,” against his father’s express orders, young Will Robinson employs dangerous alien technology to matter-transfer himself across the gulf of space and back to Earth, materializing in a small town at Christmastime. His plan is to alert Alpha Control at Cape Kennedy of his family’s location on a distant, barren planet so that a rescue ship might be dispatched. But no one in town believes that he’s a member of the famous First Family in Space, long missing and now presumed dead! In what U.S. state is located the small town to which Will beams himself?

14) Who wrote the book that served as inspiration for the movie Christmas with the Kranks?

15) Gimmel, Nun, Hey, and Shin are the Hebrew letters traditionally inscribed on a dreidel, one on each of the four sides. A dreidel is a spinning top associated with Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights. The letters stand for the phrase “Nes gadôl hayah sham,” or in English, “A great miracle happened there.” In Israel, the phrase is modified slightly to read “Nes gadôl hayah poh,” or “A great miracle happened here.” But what are Kimar, Rigna, Stobo, and Shim?

16) Because nothing says Yuletide like math, in “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” how many presents are given altogether?

17) Name all of Santa’s reindeer!

18) In It’s a Wonderful Life, a distraught and suicidal George Bailey is certain that his family and friends would have been better off had he never been born, and in a chilling alternate-history sequence, his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody, allows him a look at just such a scenario in a bid to convince George otherwise. The two stop for a drink at a bar George finds markedly changed from the friendly watering hole he’d always known. While Clarence considers ordering a flaming rum punch, he finally settles on “a mulled wine, heavy on the cinnamon, light on the troubles!” George, on the other hand, asks for a stiff drink more suited to his current mood; what does he order?

19) Last Christmas is based on the Wham song of the same name, written and co-performed by British pop star George Michael. Though released in 2019, in what year is the film primarily set?

20) What Christmas song plays over the end-credits of Die Hard (1988)?

The next post will be up at 2:00PM

Join us tomorrow afternoon, December 3, at 1:00PM for our Virtual Holiday Get-Together!

This event will constitute the first part of the club’s 2022 Seasonal Celebrations! (Our in-person Christmas Luncheon, scheduled for the following Saturday, December 10, constitutes the second part; more information about that affair is to be posted next week—watch this space!)

Beginning at 1:00PM, we’ll be gathering on ZOOM to chat and share as the Holidays near. This will afford particularly our out-of-towners the opportunity to wish each other the very best of the season, and of course, to talk all things sci-fi, and beyond!

No formal programming is planned, but we welcome any ad hoc contributions of an SF/F or seasonal theme—show off your homemade SF/F Christmas tree decorations, put up photos of your miniature Christmas village, recommend favourite Holiday movies, etc. 

And, akin to the perennial Christmas specials that air on TV, we’ll post on our site some of the best Holiday presentations we’ve featured these past few years of pandemic-induced e-meetings!

So join us for a few minutes, or a few hours, tomorrow, Saturday, December 3, beginning at 1:00PM for the club’s 2022 Virtual Holiday Get-Together!

Join us for a Virtual Holiday Get-Together this Saturday, December 3!

This event will constitute the first part of the club’s 2022 Seasonal Celebrations! (Our in-person Christmas Luncheon, scheduled for the following Saturday, December 10, constitutes the second part; more information about that affair is to be posted next week—watch this space!)

So, on December 3, beginning at 1:00PM, we’ll be gathering on ZOOM to chat and share as the Holidays near. This will afford particularly our out-of-towners the opportunity to wish each other the very best of the season, and of course, to talk all things sci-fi, and beyond!

No formal programming is planned, but we welcome any ad hoc contributions of an SF/F or seasonal theme—show off your homemade SF/F Christmas tree decorations, put up photos of your miniature Christmas village, recommend favourite Holiday movies, etc.

And, akin to the perennial Christmas specials that air on TV, we’ll post on our site some of the best Holiday presentations we’ve featured these past few years of pandemic-induced e-meetings!

Do join us for a few minutes, or a few hours, this Saturday, December 3, beginning at 1:00PM for the club’s 2022 Virtual Holiday Get-Together!

 

Join us for a Virtual Holiday Get-Together this Saturday, December 3, beginning at 1:00PM!

We’ll be gathering on ZOOM to chat and share as the Holidays near. This will be an opportunity to wish each other the very best of the season, and to talk all things sci-fi, and beyond!

No formal programming is planned, but we welcome any ad hoc contributions of an SF/F or seasonal theme—your homemade Christmas tree decorations, your miniature Christmas village, recommendations of favourite Holiday movies, etc.

And, akin to the perennial Christmas specials that air on TV, we’ll post on our site some of the best Holiday presentations we’ve featured these past few years of pandemic-induced e-meetings!

So join us for a few minutes, or a few hours, this Saturday beginning at 1:00PM for the club’s 2022 Virtual Holiday Get-Together!

Two zines to share, edited by Guy Lillian:

Spartacus no. 61

CHALLENGER 43

This post officially closes today’s MonSFFA e-meeting.

12) THANK YOU!

We proffer our sincere thanks to Danny Sichel, Keith Braithwaite, and Cathy Palmer-Lister for their contributions to today’s programme, and thank, as well, all of our supporting contributors this afternoon. MonSFFA would not be able to put on these virtual meetings without the stellar efforts of such club members!

And of course, to those who visited with us today, and took in our online get-together, thank you for your interest and attention, and don’t forget to comment!

13) WRAP-UP (UPCOMING MonSFFA CHRISTMAS LUNCH/PARTY)

To wrap things up, we’ll address the club’s upcoming Christmas Party/Lunch. We have been, and will now, in the final minutes of today’s ZOOM-chat, be discussing the particulars of our Christmas get-together, with the intention of finalizing plans. Within the next week, we’ll post all pertinent details, so watch this space.

We can confirm at this time that a hall has been booked on the West Island, next to major bus and commuter-train routes, and a date selected—Saturday, December 10. This will be an afternoon, in-person gathering, with a catered, self-serve buffet offered, and our traditional Christmas Gift Raffle on the agenda!

We hope you can join us on the 10th!

14) SIGN-OFF AND ODE OF REMEMBRANCE

We sincerely hope you have enjoyed your time with us these past few hours and, with Remembrance Day having transpired just yesterday, are glad to have been able to pay our respects to Canada’s veterans.

Thank you for dropping in, today, and we encourage you to visit www.MonSFFA.ca regularly for additional content.

Our hoped-for return to in-person club meetings has been stymied by pandemic-related circumstances, unfortunately; we will keep you updated as to any progress regarding our search for a new meeting room!

This is Post 6 of 7.

10) WHAT ARE YOU READING/WATCHING?

On ZOOM at this moment, we’re asking “What are You Reading, or Watching?” Give us your quick book report, or your brief review of a film or TV show you’ve recently been enjoying!

For those not participating in our ZOOM chat, today, you may still contribute by submitting your concise book reports or movie and television-series reviews via this post’s “Leave a Comment” option. We welcome your input.

11) GALLERY: GENRE SNOW GLOBES

Or, alternately, we invite you to peruse this gallery of lovely genre-themed snow globes:

This is Post 5 of 7.

9)

Steven Spielberg terrorized beach-goers in the summer of 1975 and initiated the modern age of cinematic blockbusters. His Jaws remains the epitome of shark movies. It has many imitators—The Reef, The Shallows—but no equals.

Some shark films, like Deep Blue Sea and The Meg, added science fictional elements to the formula and independent, low-budget, straight-to-video filmmakers soon dove into those lucrative waters, with mixed results.

Some adopted the idea of purposely producing so-bad-it’s-good fare as comically wacky entertainment, resulting in Sharktopus, Dinoshark, Sharknado, and other examples of brainless, B-movie, sci-fi/shark movies. The best of these basked in their absurdity and played as tongue-in-cheek homages to both the shark-adventure and science fiction genres.

At the bottom of the chum bucket are found the irredeemably botched SF/F shark movies, truly the worst, most unprofessional, hackneyed, nonsensical, substandard, misguided failures. Highlighted below are titles that we judged largely as such. Your mileage may differ.

Sharkenstein (2016)

A way-out, wild sci-fi/horror mélange of Jaws, Nazispoitation, and Frankenstein, Mark Polonia directs this earnest but unsatisfactorily executed movie, featuring a cast that includes at least a couple of moderately capable independent-film actors boasting a number of genuine credits within the low-budget horror genre.

The story involves a mad scientist’s scheme—the Great Experiment—to create from the body parts of Great Whites, Hammerheads, Makos and other man-eaters, the penultimate killer shark, into which will be surgically implanted the undying heart and brain of Frankenstein’s monster!

Having originated during World War II, the plan finally comes to fruition in present-day USA. Arriving in a small coastal town for a day of boating, three friends, Skip, Coop, and Madge, soon become entangled in the scientist’s dastardly plans.

While the writing and, in particular, special effects utterly fail to live up to the production’s central, high-concept idea, I’ll give the principal players kudos for, once or twice, expressing through their performances a knowing nod to the fatuous genre within which they are working.

At one point, Greta Volkova, starring as Madge, delivers a line of awkwardly scripted foreshadowing with the mock gravitas appropriate to the occasion. “I’ve never seen a shark like that before,” she emotes. “It looked like a grotesque combination of different sharks.” She later pays nerdy, loving tribute to the Frankenstein story, rattling off a list of classic Frankenstein films produced by Universal and Hammer.

And Jeff Kirkendall, affecting a clichéd German accent as the mad scientist, crowingly outlines his outrageous plan in detail for our three heroes, who find themselves his captives at one point. He and other neo-Nazis operating clandestinely across the globe intend to deploy an “indestructible and unstoppable” army of supersharks, beginning with the archetypal “Sharkenstein.” Eventually, the preserved brains of Nazi leaders, including Hitler himself, will be transferred into these abominations, thus triggering another World War, which this time, the Nazis will win! After a few silent beats to allow the horrendous enormity of the plan to sink in, he melodramatically intones, “This is the part where you tell me I’m crazy!”

All fun, if decidedly imperfect, stuff, in the spirit of the genre, marred further by the clumsiest possible compositing of a Sharkenstein puppet and blood-splatter with live action footage!

Planet of the Sharks (2016) and Empire of the Sharks (2017)

The Asylum, an independent film production house specializing in low-budget, straight-to-video projects, is the chief purveyor of “sharksploitation” flicks like these two. Both are from director Mark Atkins, Empire a prequel to Planet.

Set in a dystopian, Waterworld-like near-future in which global warming has caused the Earth’s glacial ice to melt, flooding the world, pockets of humanity survive on small floating islands of barges, wharves, and boats tethered together.

With ocean plankton unable to endure the warming waters, the ocean’s food chain is collapsing and almost all sea life is dying off, leaving only a great school of sharks, led by an alpha female. But with no fish to eat, the ocean’s apex predators must hunt for food above the surface. “And that’s us,” explains Planet of the Sharks’ Dr. Shayne Nichols, a scientist who is working with others to launch a rocket equipped with CO₂ scrubbers into the high atmosphere, and so reverse the effects of climate change and lower sea levels. Yeah, that’ll work!

But first, an electronic gizmo must be dropped into a dormant undersea volcano in order to draw the threatening sharks to their doom when the team open fire with a laser, which will trigger an eruption. Or something.

There’s a lot of tedious, unnecessary detail, here, which causes the story to drag. And between brief and uninspiringly shot scenes of unconvincing CGI sharks leaping out of the water to chomp on people, far too much of the film’s runtime is spent on lengthy sequences of expository dialogue among the protagonists, just standing around talking to each other. There are also a number of completely superfluous characters, who contribute little, if anything, to the story, save only to further pad out the film’s runtime.

Empire of the Sharks is saddled with many of the same flaws, presenting audiences with countless interminable shots of characters staring intently or woefully at off-screen goings-on, or skimming about on various watercraft, or manoeuvering underwater with Sea Scooters, or aboard a submersible.

Something of a Mad Max on the water, the action, such as it is, follows a poorly realized young hero, who sets out to rescue his girlfriend, Willow, taken captive in the first reel by a ruling overlord. Martial law is imposed by way of a legion of sharks, which the antagonists control with what looks somewhat like a pair of gloves pilfered from the Rollerball set and wrapped in a string of Christmas lights. Each of this post-apocalyptic world’s small, floating communities are required to pay a regular tribute to the strongman, with ruthless punishment meted out to any who refuse, or defy him. Transgressors are held prisoner on his floating fortress and forced into slave labour, with those marked for execution tied to a float and fed to the ravenous sharks.

Long story short, our hero assembles a crew of mercenary types to help rescue the girl and overthrow the evil empire. She, meanwhile, possessed of an innate psychic ability, channels her powers to challenge the overlord for control of sharks, managing to turn them against him and helping to win the day. Like her father before her, she is a “shark caller,” and is celebrated as such as the film concludes.

A handful of the actors, at least, cast in these films have as much fun with their roles as dull scripting will allow, most notably Empire’s Jonathan Pienaar, who plays the overlord’s right-hand man with over-the-top, villainous relish.

Nary a farcical wink is offered to the inherent cheesiness of either movie, and so, these pictures are nothing more than pedestrian sci-fi/actioners. So if you like nonsensically bad science fiction films, you’ll have a better time with The Asylum’s hit, Sharknado, which fully embraces and lampoons the flavour of sci-fi B-movies and its own outlandish premise.

Ouija Shark (2020)

One would not be exceedingly surprised to discover that this movie was produced by a sixth-grader equipped with dad’s camcorder and I suppose that Ottawa-based actor/writer/director Brett Kelly was, once, some years ago, in the sixth grade. Kelly, who guested at ConCept in 2006, directs, here, under his Scott Patrick pseudonym.

Reportedly made for some $300, most of that budget apparently allocated to the titular shark, a rubber, dollar store-quality toy, one cannot reasonably expect very much, if anything, of this film.

Expectations met!

A group of girls enjoying a backyard pool party decide to experiment with an old Ouija board that one of them found washed up on a nearby beach. Inadvertently, they conjure up the ghost of a Great White Shark, which appears as a glowing spectre unremarkably superimposed into various scenes as, one after another, each of the girls is attacked by this phantom fish.

The cast are high-school-drama-club amateurish, a few especially so, the pacing often lethargic, and the production values carelessly inferior. But these factors, coupled with the sheer idiocy of the whole affair, might have been forgiven had the writers injected moments of self-aware pretense. Alas, we are offered but a few weak barbs, not nearly enough of a boost to elevate the piece whatsoever.

Kelly has produced better stuff under his actual name; this one is to be avoided.

Land Shark (2020); Original Title: Lù Xing Shā

Candygram.

The English title of this movie suggests a feature-film adaptation of that classic Saturday Night Live skit, but this is, in fact, a Chinese creature-feature budgeted at some $2 million. Rather derivative of such fare as Deep Blue Sea, The Meg, Tremors, and any number of kaiju films—there’s even a Free Willy moment included!—director Cheng Si-Yu helmed what proved to be a pretty standard-issue CGI-monster movie, reasonably well-crafted but tarnished by a daft premise.

A pharmaceutical research laboratory’s attempt to engineer an anti-cancer drug via genetic tampering results in the creation of a giant, beastly shark capable of terrorizing mankind in the water, and on land!

All of the stereotypical characters that populate such genre films are present, here: the take-charge hero, shark wrangler Song Yi, and his goofy friend and sidekick, Pang Yu, responsible for comic relief; the greedy, callous corporate executive behind the experiment, Qian Cheng; the noble scientist, young, pretty Ye Xin, also our hero’s romantic interest; her craven, morally bankrupt colleague; the leader of Cheng’s private militia, who begins to question his boss’ ethics; the cute kid; and a gaggle of others who serve as chum.

Early in the narrative, the lab’s team of scientists and technicians are surprised to discover that their test subject, an aggressive male shark, is pregnant, an incomprehensible turn of events. “Could it be possible,” asks the portly Pang Yu, “that the shark is so depressed because of being locked up, that it became a sissy as a result?”

I watched the English dub of the film, so I’ll allow that something may have been lost in the translation, however, such puerile dialogue did not bode well.

Later, it’s learned that the shark’s genetic material was augmented by that of earthworms, which reproduce asexually. This, apparently, explains the shark’s pregnant state, and its ability to move about on land and burrow through the soil in hot pursuit of the panicked laboratory personnel! There’s a lot of frantic running away, willy-nilly, until in a moment of respite, we hear again from Pang Yu, who unintentionally summarizes the entire movie. “What’s this even about?” he gasps, breathless. “The sea creature that swims on land! This is quite unscientific.”

Indeed.

Not to be taken seriously as the straight-up science fiction/action picture it aspires to be, but that said, Land Shark does have its charms.

Shark Side of the Moon (2022)

Another one from The Asylum, this stultifyingly lame sci-fi effort, is part Jaws, part Iron Sky, all stupid!

Shark Side of the Moon is a so-called “Mockbuster,” that is, a cheap and cheesy movie that capitalizes on the recognition and popularity of one or more critically-acclaimed and/or big-budget box office successes, often blatantly filching elements from the mainstream films that served as inspiration. Sometimes, this results in a charmingly silly, funny, entertaining, tongue-firmly-in-cheek, in-joke homage of sorts.

But not in this case. Not at all. Even remotely.

The title suggests an astonishingly ridiculous premise, and indeed, Shark Side of the Moon, released as a “Tubi Original” and part of the low-rent streaming service’s Bitefest, involves a colony of deadly human/shark hybrids who have established a technologically advanced colony on the moon!

Created by Soviet scientists during the Cold War, these creatures quickly escaped, but before they could wreak havoc, were lured aboard a space shuttle by one of the scientists for a one-way flight to the moon. Forty years later, American astronauts returning to the moon soon encounter these lunar shark-men, as well as the scientist—he remained aboard the shuttle as pilot—and his half-human, half-shark daughter!

The acting is shoddy and melodramatic, the dialogue inane, and the direction and editing lacklustre, with only the occasional visual effect offering a modicum of flair.

And I won’t even bother to address the film’s unforgivable misunderstanding of basic science, the dubious logic of proceedings, or the sagacity of characters’ motivations because, clearly, the screenwriters didn’t seem to think any of that particularly important, either!

Sharkula (2022)

Director Mark Polonia seems to revel in cut-rate sharksploitation projects; he tapped into the Frankenstein mythos in 2016 (see above) and here returns with a bat-shit crazy Dracula-inspired shark movie!

Set in present-day New England, in the coastal town of Arkham—a salute to Lovecraft—the story began centuries earlier. Count Dracula is chased by a “makeshift mob of uneducated farmers” to the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea, where he is stabbed. Wounded, he falls into the raging surf below and is immediately attacked by a large, blood-lusting shark. By way of “mind control,” however, the King of the Vampires succeeds in communicating with, and transferring to the shark his curse.

“If I served him, he would protect me,” Dracula explains later, as he recounts the tale to Arthur and Mina, two of the film’s leads, all of whom are named for characters in Stoker’s original novel. “We all serve someone, or something. Even the mighty Dracula!” he continues. “As those who serve me, I must serve it.”

“Sounds like a load of crap!” replies Arthur.

Precisely.

And the crap doesn’t come any more coiled and steaming than in this movie.

The writing is atrociously bad and the acting underwhelming, though a couple of cast members do strive desperately to make something more interesting of the material they’ve been given. Meanwhile, for some reason—maybe to put across a weird, cultish vibe but more likely to extend the film’s runtime—director Polonia returns often to non-sequitur shots of a leather-clad woman dancing on a beach at dusk twirling what look like flaming marshmallows on sticks!

There is really only one worthwhile thing to be found in this flick: a catchy, 1960s-style, surf-guitar piece by the Sea Demons, employed as Sharkula’s theme song.

Listen here:

Conclusion:

If you like your science fiction, horror, and shark movies cheap, cheesy, and stupid, drop your line in these waters!

All kidding aside, it’s easy to slam such efforts and poke fun, but even the most egregious examples often include a spark or two of creativity that, given more talent and money, may well have amounted to something.