Shark Girl (2024)

Directed by Justin Shilton [Other horror films: N/A] & Rob Zazzali [Other horror films: N/A]

I have to be honest: Shark Girl surprised me.

To be very blunt, I wasn’t expecting to care for the movie. I just didn’t think it’d be my type of thing. The production looked good, but I was worried the story would be its downfall, similar to Truth or Double Dare (TODD), which had a solid production, but it has what I feel is a soulless story.

Here, though, while the opening does look a bit on the cheap side, we generally have a pretty solid story, and even when things move a different direction around 47 or so minutes in, they keep things engaging enough to work. Hell, even the finale, with a little bit of sequel bait, was pretty fun, and that’s not something I see done well all that often.

Before carrying on, I do want to state for the record that I watched this upon request. One of the directors contacted me, wondering if I’d be interested in reviewing it. To my embarrassment, for a variety of factors, I didn’t actually see this email until something like a month after it was sent – I mean, you play with the Jiggy, you get the delay. In all seriousness, I felt bad, so I was committed to watching whatever it was, regardless of my personal interest.

Obviously, that’s playing with fire, but luckily, it didn’t matter this time around. Shark Girl surprised me – I honestly didn’t think I’d enjoy it, but I had a lot of fun with this. I thought the tone would be campier, but they kept things mostly played straight, save Alexandra Corin Johnston’s role as a young influencer, Heidi, who, through no fault of her own, gets attacked by a shark and finds herself craving human flesh. A role like that does need a certain amount of ham to it, and I thought Johnston did a great job.

In fact, I found her story quite interesting anyway. Sure, she’s an influencer, but her attitude generally seemed decent (despite Ryan Bertroche’s opinion that she’s toxic, in a line that legit made me laugh), and once she gets these urges, with it comes increased independence – she’s not going to settle for her boyfriend pushing her to the side for other models, or treating her poorly. In fact, in one of my favorite sequences, after a photoshoot goes astray because John Griffin’s character is an utter asshat, Heidi goes after him for berating an intern. That, and what follows, was very much just desserts, in my view.

Had it stopped with Heidi going after only those who were utterly insufferable (to be fair, her first victims, a couple on the beach, don’t fit that bill, but that was before Heidi had any real idea of what was going on), I doubt that many people would care. It’s beyond her control, though, as these urges become stronger, and she finds herself going after those closest to her. Still, there’s a sense of liberation in Alexandra Corin Johnston’s performance, and I appreciated that.

In fact, I’d say most of the central characters here were pretty solid. Alexandra Corin Johnston (Dead List), I’ve talked about at length, and it seems that she had a lot of fun in this role. Ryan Bertroche’s character was an utter tool, but luckily, we’re not forced to spend that much time with him. More interesting are both Sumayyah Ameerah (Confined) and Nick Tag, who I think worked quite well together. Ameerah’s character was important anyway, given the marine biology background (which I want to touch on briefly later), but she was also quite good here overall. Both John Griffin (Deadlock) and Delaney Hogan did well playing utterly insufferable characters, so kudos there.

Lastly, I wanted to mention Brian Guest, who was sporting a Gotham-era Donal Logue attitude. Guest (Infection: The Invasion Begins, Evil Unleashed) doesn’t get a lot of time here to shine, but he’s certainly able to with his brief time on-screen, which I dug.

I was worried about how they’d attempt to tie up the ending. A character winds up dead, and it’s almost set up as though it’s an assassination. I wasn’t sure if they’d be trying to bring in some type of government cover-up angle, or exactly where it was going, but I think they handled it pretty well. Somewhat related, Sumayyah Ameerah’s character has a dream nearing the finale, which sort of clues her into where Tag’s character disappeared to.

Normally, a random dream revealing a piece of the puzzle to a character wouldn’t do it for me, but in this case, I actually thought it made perfect sense. Given her background in marine biology, it makes sense that perhaps her subconscious might relay to her information she knows, but hasn’t been fully able to process into this situation yet. It doesn’t really matter, but the fact that the dream can be explained, and it’s not just some random occurrence, does help things. If it had been another character, like Tag’s, who had this dream, than that would have been a problem.

Oh, and this is also worth mentioning, and it ties partially into why I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. After reading the plot on IMDb, it got in my head that this would be a body-horror type situation – that, over the course of the film, Alexandra Corin Johnston’s character would slowly turn into a shark. I have always had personal issues enjoying body horror elements (how I got through Contracted, I’ll never know), but the movie doesn’t really go that direction, which I appreciated.

Because of that, there’s not necessarily great diversity in the kills, but at the same time, it’s not like people watch a movie like Mississippi River Sharks or Malibu Shark Attack to see some creative deaths, so that’s not really a barometer you should really use. There’s some blood, some chunks of flesh ripped out by bites, but it’s generally pretty tame, and far from the focus of the film.

I’ve said time and time again that I don’t know the details of what goes down when making a movie. I sit here and watch the final product, and can only imagine how difficult the process of filming a movie is, not to mention all the post-production editing that I imagine most movies do. I’m not a behind-the-scenes guy; I watch a movie, and sometimes it works for me, other times it doesn’t.

In Shark Girl’s case, it worked for me, and I really didn’t think it would. It’s a fun movie (without veering anywhere close to becoming too goofy) with decent characters, occasionally some amusing pieces of dialogue, and solid performances overall. It’s a movie I could easily see myself revisiting in the future, and save for that hideous club music that plays throughout, Shark Girl is a movie I think is worth seeing at least once.

7.5/10