Raging Sharks

Raging Sharks (2005) Directed by Danny Lerner

Is the world ready for a Sci-fi/Horror/Action/Submarine/Spy/Shark Movie? Sure, why not? Raging Sharks is not that movie.

Let’s start at the beginning: I knew Raging Sharks was not going to be a great film. I’m not an idiot. It’s not like I thought this was a cross between Jaws and Raging Bull. In fact, I thought that this would be some sort of Deep Blue Sea knockoff. If only.

The first big surprise that director Danny Lerner had for me was the opening sequence—which is in space. Yes, space—the final frontier. I thought for a second that my disc had the wrong film recorded on it, but I wasn’t about to complain because maybe the movie that was actually on the DVD would be a rollicking space opera--and that might be better than a rollickless shark operetta. Then, for a brief second I dared to dream…of space sharks. How cool would that have been? Very cool.

Cooler than what I actually got—which was an exterior of some spaceship cruising along in space followed by a foggy interior of another ship where a pair of space aliens are sitting around and doing something with a big set of glass tubes. (Upon closer examination of the packaging I discovered that the back cover shows a pair of scuba diving space aliens exploring underwater. How did I miss that?) Suddenly the other ship rams their ship and both ships explode sending a glowing orange-red canister hurtling through space and then all the way to earth where it crashes into an indeterminately Eastern European freighter sending it to the bottom of the ocean after a violent (and trailer-worthy) explosion.

Flash forward to five years later at the impact zone which just happens to be in the Bermuda Triangle. Why is it in the Bermuda Triangle? No good reason.
The research ship Paradiso is waiting on the undersea research station Oshona to send their chief up to catch a helicopter—which turns out to be an unnecessary complication since geography seems to mean nothing in this movie. According to the Physics of Raging Sharks a helicopter can get to Boston from Bermuda fast enough for someone to get there in time to be called back to Bermuda for something that happened minutes after the helicopter took off in the first place and a submarine taking off from Boston back to Bermuda can make the same trip in the other direction--only faster. Now, maybe the helicopter was ferrying the passenger to a jet—but still. Why bother including that complication? Isn’t there a better way to introduce the chief villain of the story as well as getting an attack submarine into the mix?

But wait a minute—aren’t the raging sharks supposed to be the main antagonists? Nope. Because this isn’t a shark movie; it’s a sci-fi/submarine/spy thriller shark movie. So, our main characters are the crew of the Oshona—a ramshackle mobile undersea research platform (MURP?) that is full of “80’s technology” that is falling apart because of the shoestring budget and ragtag crew: which is a good description of Raging Sharks, too. Dr. Mike Olsen (Corin Nemec—you know, Parker Lewis from Parker Lewis Can’t Lose) is the man behind the Oshona and yet he keeps telling his wife Linda (Vanessa Angel) that he’d rather start a family and live in a real house in a place whose name “doesn’t begin or end in ocean.” So, why does he bother doing undersea research if he doesn’t care? Why am I even curious about this? And why is Corin Nemec’s name on the cover? How many Parker Lewis fans are there out there? Why isn’t Vanessa Angel’s name on the cover? She was in Spies Like Us. And what about Corbin Bernsen? Why isn’t his name on the cover? People might actually want to see a movie that has Vanessa Angel and Corbin Bernsen—which of course may have been enough reason for those two to hide and give way to Corin “Who the heck is this guy?” Nemec.

Meanwhile, back in the movie: As soon as Dr. Olsen leaves the Oshona, the lab loses two of its expendable divers to the raging sharks. Linda goes out to see what happened and is swarmed by the sharks and barely manages to make it back on board alive. The sharks, at their most rage-y, proceed to chew off the Oshona’s air and power lines prompting the big crisis of the movie. All attempts to fix this are met by the same clips of sharks raging—a combination of real shark footage, digital sharks, and an animatronic shark—and, of course, some very vague shark’s eye POV shots—presumably from the lead raging shark, because there are never any other sharks in those shots.

So, Dr. Olsen has to come back from his fundraising trip to Boston—but how can he make it back in record speed? With the attack submarine U.S.S. Roosevelt, of course, under the command of Capt. Riley (Corbin Bernsen). So, the Oshona is running out of air near Bermuda and their rescuers are booking it down from Boston and the sharks, they are a-raging. A diver from the Paradiso is sent down to a certain death prompting an old bearded sailor on the bridge to pull off his knit cap and weep silently. Who was that old guy? Who knows? We never saw him before that moment and we never see him again. I think he might have been one of the financial backers of the film watching the final product.
Then the coast guard sends a seaplane to—well, who the hell knows what the seaplane was going to do to help—and the diver from the seaplane falls off the float of the plane, cartwheels along the surface and is then torn to pieces by the sharks, who are still a-raging. And the silliest part of that sequence? The mountains behind the seaplane. Let me get this straight, you have enough of a budget to make digital sharks, but you don’t have enough time/money/inclination to wipe out the mountains behind the rescue team. That can mean only one thing: the producers must have assumed that no one would actually be watching this movie. (They were wrong because obviously they didn't know what $2 and a momentary lapse of reason will do to a man.)

Although there are movies that are more shoddily made than this one, many of them betray a certain quirkiness and complete lack of ability when it comes to details that make them (unintentionally) hilarious. Raging Sharks, though, is a movie that is carefully scrubbed of anything that approaches character, and which is, conversely, relatively solidly acted and produced. It's just like a solidly produced bowl of plaster. Sure, it fills you up, but it has no taste.

It’s the writing here that really stinks. The screenwriter in this case is named Les Weldon. (Less Well Done?) If there was some justice in the world he'd have to take a defensive writing class to make up for this movie. At one point Vera (Elise Muller) says “It’s not our faults. It’s not.” I don't think Les Weldon wrote that line. It was too genuine. I don't think it was part of the movie. That line sounded to me like a plea for understanding—understanding which I am happy to provide, even to the weakest link in the chain. (I’m looking at you, Bernard van Bilderbeek aka “Binky.”)

Yes, according to IMDB Bernard (or Binky) van Bilderbeek is the real name of the actor who plays Harvey, the cowardly undersea technician whose only character trait beyond cowardice and idiocy is saying “bloody ‘ell” every time he speaks. He’s awful, but on reflection it’s not his fault either. I doubt he ever said “you know, I think Harvey would say ‘bloody ‘ell’ here.” No, that sounds like some bad writing to me. Just like the part where the lab technician looks at something and just says “interesting…fascinating.” That’s a whole scene. It’s no wonder the sharks are raging. I am too, at this point.

Meanwhile an opportunistic camera crew is attacked and killed by the sharks for no reason. Either before or after that (I can’t remember which, and I assure you I don’t care anymore) the sharks go on a tear on the beach at Bermuda and eat a whole mess of people. You see, the sharks (a coalition of 12 species) are hunting as if they’re all part of a unit. They’re coalescing, they’re cooperating, they’re coordinating, they’re organizing, they’re…unionizing. Why? Something to do with the alien fuel that they have apparently been eating. One of the sharks gets caught in a net after the Great Bermuda People Eating Excursion and it gets cut open revealing the little red-orange alien fuel.

Meanwhile the USS Roosevelt has another passenger, Ben Stiles (Todd Jensen) supposedly some sort of agent for the Marine Oceanic Agency but actually an agent of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) who’s there to make sure that no one else finds out about the alien fuel source, which, it turns out is some sort of cold fusion version of extra large pop rocks that “the government” doesn’t want to have to share with the rest of the world. Shadowy government within a government that is willing to kill people to hide secret technology in the name of national security? That’s the one part of this movie that actually seems believable.
For a brief second it looks like this movie will attempt a message.

Vera: You don’t own the goddamn ocean.
Stiles: We own whatever we want.

Dick Cheney couldn’t have said it better. And if this wasn’t a movie where sharks made sounds like lions, hyenas and wild pigs that last exchange could have had some impact. Instead, it just falls as flat as a flapjack and before you know it Stiles is machine-gunning the crew of the Oshona. (Except for the lab tech, who gets stabbed in the back at his desk. "Interesting...fascinating...sharp--ahhh!") I was curious as to how Stiles managed to sneak his HK onto the Oshona when his method of entry was scuba diving without so much as a fanny pack or a messenger pouch, but maybe the HK was disassembled, or maybe it was in the sleeve of his wetsuit or maybe he hid it Papillon-style. And the parts work well after being brought through salt-water because it’s a “sub” machine gun. Ha ha ha. (Please kill me now.)

I actually felt bad when Stiles riddled Vera in the back, and not just because Elise Muller is kind of cute, but because in the course of an hour of film we knew nothing about her character. It’s as if the writer didn’t even care enough to create a character there. Then again, maybe that’s just as well given how ham-handed the attempts to make us care about other characters end up being. The phrase “It’s my little boy’s birthday” might as well be replaced by “I am a human being about to be eaten by raging sharks, please care about me accordingly. I am not expendable.” Oh, but you are. You all are.

And so are the sharks. At one point the submarine is called upon to fire a torpedo into the swarm of sharks killing many of them. (Roy Scheider never thought of that, did he?)It's that easy? Why didn't they just finish off the rest of the sharks that way?

So, the evil government agent kills off the crew members who weren’t eaten by sharks leaving just Parker Lewis and the girl from Spies Like Us. Cue "Soulfinger." That’s when everything becomes mysterious. The aliens show up in an operatic musical sequence—one of many times where there’s actual opera music in the score (Verdi, Catalani)—and they recover their fuel as the Oshona implodes. Corbin Bernsen mourns (in a manly way) even though he'd only known Dr. Olsen for a few hours. But wait! Dr. Olsen manages to get his scuba gear on after semi-consciously watching the aliens through the picture-window as he and his wife run out of oxygen—just like the movie. Stiles, who also miraculously survived the implosion, tries to stop the Olsens, but he is torn apart by the still raging sharks leaving the way clear for Arnie Becker’s submarine to rescue Parker Lewis and his wife. Linda, though, wasn’t conscious and didn’t have her scuba gear so the last bit of suspense is the fifteen second drama of “is she drownded or will she breathe?” and you can imagine how that ends. Happily ever after, of course, though no one on the submarine believes the story about the aliens that Dr. Olsen saw.

So, what the hell happened here? Was this a shark movie? Not really. The sharks are still there at the end. Some of them probably still have bits of alien fuel in them. Will they keep raging and keep getting smarter? Probably. Was this a spy thriller? Not really. The entire thriller angle consisted of one government agent showing up and killing some people only to be eaten by sharks. Not really a John Le Carré story. And isn't the government still going to come after the fuel and anyone who might have known about it? Was this a sci-fi movie? Not even as close as The Abyss. This is the kind of movie that gives hybrids a bad name. It pleases no fans of any genre. It probably doesn't even do much to please people who just enjoy moving pictures with no regard to content at all.

Raging Sharks is a homunculus of a movie cobbled together from several genres or ideas of genres and thoroughly bleached of any character.

So, is there anything of value in there?

There’s the (most likely) unintentional humor of Harvey lighting up a cigarette several minutes after it was announced that the station is running out of air. There are some decent miniature sequences and some of the action sequences in the Oshona are okay. The interior scenery of the Oshona is good and there’s a dream sequence with a shark in the picture window that is completely inexplicable and unnecessary and yet one of the better crafted moments in the movie.

Probably the best thing I can say about this movie is that it doesn’t have the obligatory exploitation moments that you might expect in something like this. You never watch anyone taking a shower. There’s never a boatful of college students having a wild drunken spring break orgy interrupted by killer raging sharks. Even the beach scene in Bermuda is remarkably chaste. Is that a good thing? Well, it’s refreshing, I must say. It evinces a lack of desperation on the part of the director and producers that is to be admired--if only for the audacity of it.

Does that make Raging Sharks worth seeing? Jeez, no. Please, I have sacrificed myself here so that no one else will need to.

On the other hand, I might say that the best acting on this DVD is in the “Behind the scenes” piece: The Terror Below: Making Raging Sharks. Here is where the most earnest performances and deepest characterizations can be found. Just look at the way Vanessa Angel wrings her hands in her interview. There’s some real anguish there—most likely about the horrible script and its impact on her career. When she says “But ultimately it’s really a story of survival and trying to get out of this really horrific situation they’re in,” I think she’s actually talking about the actors on this movie. “It’s about how different people deal with adversity,” says another actor. Yeah, I believe it. Look at the smarmy way Les Weldon says “I think the audience will respond to the story because we’re not just giving them sharks and/or aliens but we’re actually bringing together what has previously been two different and distinctive genres.” Those two genres being: crappy movies and painfully crappy movies. The editor of the movie, Michele Gisser says proudly, “The sharks in Raging Sharks are not your average sharks because they’re just extreme.” Extremely what? I bet you don’t even know what extreme means. Corbin Bernsen describes the set as a “One hundred million dollar submarine.” Really? Would that be in Bermudan Dollars? Todd Jensen goes out of way to ingratiate himself by saying that someone should write a book about the director. “He’s the encyclopedia—the dictionary—of filmmaking.” I think I’d prefer to find the thesaurus of filmmaking. Meanwhile Danny Lerner, the director, inflates the importance of the movie. “People been asked what is the most fear subject in the world—including terrorism—and number one was come the shark.” Yes, number one was come the shark, indeed. And finally Michele Gisser closes out this mercifully short cruise into the abyss: “It’s a roller coaster ride that will keep the audience on the edge of their seats ‘til the end.” Yes, it sure kept me on the edge of my seat all the way ‘til the end, because I was always on the edge of getting up and leaving my own house to avoid watching the rest of it.

Somewhere out there is a good sci-fi/submarine/action/shark/thriller/buddy-cop/comedy movie. I hope we find it someday soon.