My notes on Sky Sharks
‘Genetically mutated flying Nazi sharks?’
As a mad science project, combining the themes and aesthetic styles of Sharknado and Iron Sky is like genesplicing hives with herpes – this German behemoth of bad from writer-director Marc Fehse activates two distinct modes of wannabe cultfilm at the same time. Mrcilessly drawn out to 102 minutes (including post-credits trailer for Sky Frogs), it sloshes comic gore with a distinctly lumpen style that seldom gets laughs (even a lift from the memorable first scene of the 2002 Ghost Ship just merits a shrug) and manages to be relentlessly aggravating.
It opens with a planeload of passengers – including Cary-Hiroyuki Tanaka doing a strange drunk Matthew McConaughey impersonation and typecast-as-a-gangbanger Robert LaSardo as a priest – doing broader mile high assholery schtick than in Exorcism at 60,000 Feet, then has the jet assailed by a swarm of flying sharks piloted by Nazi zombies. Ex-Nazi scientist/industrialist Klaus Richter (Thomas Morris, in old age makeup and a cyberspine) knows that an old Nazi superweapon program has been revived, and his more-or-less heroic daughters – Angelique (Barbara Nedeljakova) and Diabla (Eva Habermann) are deployed to do something about it, though one of them gets infected.
With extensive flashbacks to World War II and more zombie soldier experiments in Vietnam to stretch things out until a squad of international hardnuts go up against the sky sharks for an extensive climax. It’s full of cameos from the sorts of folk who appear at autograph conventions with their most famous credits in brackets under their billing – Lar Park-Lincoln (Friday the 13th Part VII The New Blood), Amanda Bearse (Fright Night), Yan Birch (The People Under the Stairs) – plus regulars like Tony Todd and Lynn Lowry, not given much worth doing. It has that CGI-tweaked, dark crayon painting look of Iron Sky, along with the usual Nazi iconography. It’s idea of being edgy and transgressive is characters getting shredded to pieces while having sex in an airplane toilet. So that’s a miss, then.
Here’s the listing.
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