By Terry Sherwood
Shark Girl has neither the silly comedy of Cocaine Shark nor the ridiculous theological background of Shark Exorcist. this is still unmistakably in the tradition of Full Moon Entertainment: absurd concept, pulpy execution, woman that the camera likes and just enough sincerity to make you wonder whether everyone was in on the joke or no one was.
The film opens at a Southern California nuclear reactor, where a coolant emergency leads to contaminated material being dumped into the ocean. The murky water, distant alarms, and the brief appearance of a CGI shark. The shark disappears quickly, and the horror begins when social influencer Heidi (Alexandra Corin Johnston) heads to the beach for a shoot with her toxic boyfriend Ron (Ryan Bertroche). He bullies her into the water to get a dramatic “wet hair flip” shot, and she vanishes beneath the waves.
That’s the last time we see Heidi as a total human. What comes back is something else. Something with teeth.
Shark Girl borrows heavily from the vampire mythos in some parts —far more than it does from revenge killer shark. Heidi doesn’t morph into a scaly fish-woman. There are no dorsal fins, gills, or tail flaps. Instead, her transformation is sharper teeth, colder eyes, a hunger for blood that’s stated not through feeding frenzies. More like Jaws connects with Species which is even more prevalent later in the film when she has to mate.
In her first attack Heidi is found unconscious on the beach by a young couple. She awakens and promptly drains the boyfriend’s blood with a single, savage bite to the neck. When the girlfriend returns, she meets the same fate. The scenes are played mostly offscreen
The story branches into a mixture of conspiracy (a corporation hiding the effects of their waste), creature feature (mutant sea predators), and evolution of Heidi herself., She becomes a cold, calculating towards toxic people and people that use her.. She stops being consumed for social likes and starts doing the consuming, both literally and socially.
Supporting characters include her best friend Sienna (Sumayyah Ameerah), a marine biologist who really doesn’t say the right things even tech language would have helped. and Christopher (Nick Tag), a amateur citizen blog reporter who starts connecting the dots between the attacks and Heidi’s sudden reappearance. Their dialogue occasionally flirts with parody territory plays like a Full Moon script, dusted off from the vault between Decadent Evil and The Killer Eye
There’s a scene involving a harpoon that almost plays like a vampire staking moment, though it stops just short of the heart. Whether that was deliberate or just missed timing, who can say
Shark Girl is what it is: a blood-soaked, synth-scored, B-grade monster movie with enough toward vampire cinema while splashing around in the shallow end of aquatic horror like the brilliantly brutal The Horror of Party Beach (1964). Similar to that film is that this one also has music, dance sequence and radioactive mutated monster that rises from the water. It is a Full Moon imitator no doubt and that’s okay as Amicus and Tigon made a business out of imitating Hammer Films.
Bloody Flicks 