Directed By: Jerry Dugan

Starring: Dolph Lundgren, Sara Malakul Lane, Lily Brooks O’Briant

A black market exotic animal dealer unwittingly unleashes mayhem when he dumps a pregnant bull shark into a lake in this low-budget, mildly entertaining creature feature.

This debut feature from commercial director Jerry Dugan follows the story of Officer Meredith Hernandez, a small town cop on the tail of an exotic animal trafficker (played with powerful indifference by action super-genius and Easter-Island Statue impersonator Dolph Lundgren) who crashes his car into a lake during a high speed chase, releasing an aggressive bull-shark and her offspring upon the unsuspecting townsfolk.

The acting in Shark Lake is shockingly bad across the board, the visual effects would be vastly improved if you developed cataracts, and the sound levels are less consistent than Primark’s t-shirt sizes. There are scenes that start and end at random times, sometimes in the middle of sentences. There is stock footage inserted at different aspect ratios to the rest of the movie, and a shark puppet that looks less real than Hulk Hogan’s punches. Yet somehow, I didn’t hate it. I actually kind of liked it.

At one point, while our leading lady is reading a police record about Lundgren’s character, it lists his hair colour as blue and his eyes as ‘blonde’. It’s not deliberate in any way and only lingers for a brief moment on screen,  but it conjures up the hilarious image of Dolph Lundgren cosplaying as a massive, beefy version of James from Team Rocket. This is the sort of ineptitude and disregard to detail that makes a true good-bad movie, and I love it.

I specifically chose this film over the likes of ‘Five-headed Shark Attack‘ or ‘Sharktopus‘ because of two reasons. One, it stars Dolph fucking Lundgren dummy. And two, Shark Lake doesn’t try to pander to the audience as a ‘manufactured’ bad movie. It wants to be a good movie, yet it is a bad movie with absolute blithering sincerity. That is why it works.

There are a few genuinely good scenes, mostly centring around Garreth Ross – a celebrity hunter and documentarian – who turns up to capture the shark. He’s a geniune charicature, complete with slicked back hair, leather jacket and English accent that wouldn’t be out of place in a mid-80’s Bond movie. His arrogant charisma transcends the movie for the few scenes he’s in, and gives you false hope that Shark Lake might actually be genuinely great. Then he gets in the water, fails to take the threat seriously and gets devoured instantly.

But like a massive Scandinavian version of Atlas, Dolph Lundgren picks up the movie ten minutes before the end and carries it to its conclusion, utilising a variety of grimaces, grunts and barely-audible one-liners on the way. By the time the credits rolled around I hadn’t had a single thought towards my own self-immolation, which is more than I can say about anything the SyFy Channel has put out. Check it out, it’s really not as shit as it looks.