Your Daily Dracula – Jeff Kirkendall, Sharkula (2021)

Your Daily Dracula – Jeff Kirkendall, Sharkula (2021)

The indescribably prolific Mark Polonia made Sharkenstein in 2016, so this was probably inevitable.  Indeed, if Polonia hadn’t made a Dracula/Jaws hybrid, someone else would have (and, for all I know, already has).  They’d almost certainly do a better job since Polonia, who has been turning stuff out since the 1980s, is essentially an amateur who comes up with a hook of an idea and an okay poster then does the absolute bare minimum to deliver a 70 minute feature which feels like forever.

With a budget that wouldn’t cover catering on a Troma set where the cast were encouraged to dumpster dive for lunch and actors unable to deliver a single convincing line reading stuck with paragraphs of exposition, Sharkula is a chore to watch – and the makeshift effects (an awful CG bat, what looks like a papier mache vampire shark, blood drops drawn on the image) don’t even have the minimal charm of one of those monster kid movies made by ten-year-olds in their backyards in the 1960s.  It opens with a mob chasing a pudgy, balding, jowly Dracula off a Transylvania cliff – Transylvania is landlocked, incidentally – and the Count being bitten on the arm by a shark, who then turns into Sharkula – a shark with occasional batwings and a thirst for blood (we have to assume that a vampire shark needs more blood than a regular one).

Some years later, two schlubs – John Beaumont (James Kelly) and Arthur Smith (Tim Hatch) – take a summer gig stacking crates in the seaside town of Arkham, which is run by ‘Vladimir Constantine’.  Arkham has a strict curfew, though few of the night scenes aren’t shot in broad daylight, and minion duties are handled by desk clerk Renfield (Kyle Rappaport, who gives technically the worst performance in the film and maybe the worst performance ever).  Mina (Jamie Morgan) is the only member of the town historical society and maybe Dracula’s bride – though why not Sharkula’s bride? – and this handful of characters stand around talking a great deal, even describing offscreen action at length.  Kirkendall’s Dracula makes Zandor Vorkov look like Daniel Day Lewis – he looks unpreposessing, even in his natty red waistcoat and red-lined cape, but his main problem is whining through his big speeches.

Late in the film, Dracula betrays his master Sharkula and gets bitten again – he grows gills, but the film can’t afford to have him get in the water so what’s the point?  There’s a surf guitar ‘Sharkula’ theme which is pretty excruciating too.  Polonia has also made Amityville Exorcism and Shark Encounters of the Third Kind.