Requins - L'armée des profondeurs

I really enjoyed this one for starters,, John Schneider did a wonderful job with the material that he was given,, i was disappointed in Daryl Hannah though,, i thought that Armand Assante did a great job as the bad guy in the movie, F. Murray Abraham didn't have enough screen time in this.. the plot was great i thought,, here you have a real estate developer trying to basically buy up the whole entire fishing community, although be it very unscroupulus in his ways, dumping illegal toxins into the bay, therefore making all the fish die off , so the community goes basically bankrupt, but in the process the chemicals do something to the sharks and mess up their brain waves, turning them basically from docile,, to manhunters,, and they eventually start to swarm on the community of Full Moon Bay,, i think this was a great TV movie, and i know many of you won't agree with me,, but i just don't care.

The movie has Terrible script. It show us terrible performances and awful lines. Just couldn't waist my time to see it until the end. Very very bad. Several scenes in the movie are plainly useless. Don't have connection with the story, and don't add any value. Why are they there ? Bad editing ? Some lines are just ridiculous and one could not believe people talk like that to each other in real life. Some things happen that result from very dumb decisions from the characters. For instance: There are these 3 boats side by side in the middle of the sea (actually one can tell it is shot in an harbour so calm the water is) the bigger boat has the engine broken and main characters want to get away from a bad guy and sharks. Instead of choosing the middle fiber boat they decide to get away using the smaller rubber boat...plainly dumb.

This is a production from RHI Entertainment, the makers and distributors of a number of awful movies like "Sharpshooter", "Depth Charge", and "Mask Of The Ninja". This should be your first clue as to the quality of this movie. The second clue is that this movie, like those others, was made for television. So there's no foul language, no nudity, no sex, and the presentation of blood and (very limited) gore could easily be showcased on prime time. But even if the movie had any of that juicy stuff, it would still be pretty hard to sit through. The script is awful - it stretches the movie past the breaking point by making the movie last more than two and a half hours. It takes forever for the characters to realize that something strange is going on and that a lot of people are missing, and even longer to find out that it's sharks causing the problems. The movie is also not very well made, with cheap-looking CGI sharks and cinematography that looks somewhat dark even when the movie is outdoors in the sunshine. There is an extremely high body count, and there is a somewhat amusing small subplot about a little girl afraid of the water, but those things are just a couple of drops in a sea of ineptness.

This movie was a classic "B" - - SciFi type of movie. It has a wonderful cast of really good actors...but in my opinion the plot was anemic, the directing was even more-so...and I loved it! Why? Because the cast each did an excellent job of acting and the setting was believable. One can see from the 'heft' of big stars where the budget most certainly was spent. It most certainly wasn't spent on special effects or, for that matter, screen writing.

All in all, I would not only recommend it because of its positive aspects...but would watch it again and again if the opportunity affords itself. The positives outweigh the negatives.

The only reason why I didn't rate Shark Swarm any lower was because of Armand Assante. Despite his rather stereotypical villainous character, he does put some gusto into his performance and he is enjoyable to watch. But the rest of the cast are poor. F Murray Abraham, outstanding in Amadeus, is wasted, he managed to save Blood Monkeys but he is not in Shark Swarm anywhere long enough to make the same impact. Daryl Hannah I loved in Splash and Roxanne, but other than her beauty she is very robotic and bland. John Schneider looks bored out of his mind, and who can blame him? They are not helped however their underdeveloped and very clichéd characters, nor by the horrendously cheesy writing. The story takes forever to get going, and never really picks up. The exposition scenes are dull and poorly written, the climax is contrived and the attacks are not scary or suspenseful in the slightest. The sharks are used sparsely, in hindsight you'd think that would work, however aside from the fact that they are horribly rendered in every scene they appear in(even the shark effects in Jersey Shore Shark Attack were this bad) you also don't learn anything about their origins or why they attack in the first place. In conclusion, Shark Swarm has nothing in its favour other than a pretty good turn from Assante(and actually even he deserved better than this). 2/10 Bethany Cox