Shark Season

The movie seemed like an earnest newcomer effort to create a suspenseful shark attack movie (not over-the-top silliness like Sharknado (2013)), but now I see that several cast and crew have a list of credits behind them. They couldn't do better? Several crew members are credited in both movies; both movies are from The Asylum.

The basic premise is straightforward: Three people get stranded in rising waters while a shark circles them. Will they survive? That's the story.

The writing was amateurish. At a few points, it seemed like the screenwriter was thinking, "I looked up some stuff for background, so dang it, I'm going to squeeze it into somebody's dialogue somewhere." For example, the distraught father is on the phone with his frightened daughter, who had just indicated that she and her cell phone might die at any moment. Did he really need to go into an extended explanation of king tides, instead of quickly telling her what to do before her phone shut down?

The characters repeated themselves a few times unnecessarily too, which felt like padding. They also flip-flopped a few times (for no apparent reason) about what they should or shouldn't do next.

There were a few disjointed topic changes in the dialogue, as if the screenwriter decided to shoehorn an arbitrary subplot or two into the script -- but only in the form of dialogue, not activity. Whether it was the writing, the direction, or the acting that was inadequate, they couldn't make up their minds about each character's attitudes toward the subplots.

The performances weren't great. Paige McGarvin had the least amateurish performance, although this included screaming "What do you want?" at the shark. Seemed to me that the shark was pretty clear about its intentions. Michael Madsen just phoned in his performance, literally. Almost all his screen time had him, by himself, on the phone.

One ludicrous bit was when the operators of a small boat told the girl treading water -- water that was entirely too deep for her to stand in -- that they couldn't come to her because the water was too shallow.

The title "Shark Season" seems pretty arbitrary. How was this shark season, really? I guess they were desperate to find a shark title that hadn't been used previously.