If it’s not one Giant Beastie attacking the township, it’s another…

There’s been: Giant Crocodiles, Giant Octopus, Giant Alligators, Giant Sharks, Giant Piranhas even Giant Whales (They’re pretty big anyway!!) I’m still waiting for a movie about a Giant Manatee!! It’s gonna reinvent the genre I tells ya…

Swamp Shark is your pretty standard bargain-bin creature-feature, we found it on the bottom shelf of Tesco’s DVD Cheapy Chart, snuggled up next to Alien Vs Hunter and Dragon Crusaders.

“Turkey Stock spillage in aisle five!” Its got a Giant Shark (seen it all before), it’s set in the Louisiana Swamps (that’s kinda new…) and the Genetically Modified Shark is a bit of a racist (Oh dear!) and not much else…

No really, this film has nothing else to it except a massive shark, lots of people dying and can be construed as quite racist if you’ve got nothing else to write about… It doesn’t have the witty one liners, or the sleazy romance, BUT it does have Kristy Swanson who played Buffy the vampire slayer in the original 1992 movie. She may be kick-ass when it comes to Vampires, but she kinda sucks when it comes to Giant Sharks. IMDB also tells me she was ordered to attend 10 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I can only conclude that this was due to working on this awful movie.

There are only a handful of deaths in this film and some of them are brilliantly stupid. Okay, so the first scene where someone snuffs it is pretty rubbish and you get that instant feeling of regret that comes with the bargain-bin gamble. It’s that moment where you realize you could have bought something useful with the money you’ve just wasted on this tripe. The box has excited you, drawn you in with unimaginable promises, but what lies inside is a massive soul-crushing disappointment that you feel ashamed to put on your shelf.

I’ve been here before…

Anyway, back to the movie and in the immortal words of the smoking hot Cilla Black “Surprise Surprise!!” It’s the black guy who dies first… oh, and second…!! UH OH!! Now I was under the impression that sci-fi/horror films had kind of moved on from the whole ‘black guy dies first’ trope that has always been such an unwelcome convention. I’ve always found it tricky to name films with this rule, but here are a few I remembered after rummaging through my DVD collection: Gremlins (black teacher dies first) Aliens (Frost dies first) and more recently Stargate (First thing the aliens do when they see the black soldier is shoot him dead!).

I guess most monsters are kind of ‘human race-ist’, otherwise they wouldn’t try and kill us all… but Swamp shark definitely seems to be the ‘I don’t like black people’ racist, which he only goes on to prove in a stunningly ridiculous death sequence inspired by the award winning feature film FREE WILLY where Swamp Willy leaps out of the murky waters and over a small pier to bite a black cop’s head off. Shouldn’t have been perving on that white couple making out, you naughty cop.

I’m thinking at this point that swamp shark can not be stopped, possibly the most racist giant mammal in any horror movie ever, he swims in the stereotype, he is a trope-ical fish…

It’s just at this point that swamp shark finally turns his life around. He’s obviously been to some counseling and thought a lot of things over. He’s a new shark, a changed shark, a shark whose got a lot of wrongs to right. He then goes on a murderous rampage to devour four white guys in quick succession bringing his kill totals up to 3 black men and 5 whities! Good work swamp shark, you brought it back in that last half hour. You’re like some sort of of ambassador for racial equality, you’ve totally changed the face of Horror movies with your cutting edge arguments for equality.

Or, definitely not…

Thankfully Swamp Shark is finally turned into sushi and heads straight for creature-feature hell where I hope they make him watch this terrible turkey of a film over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over  again.

I can’t think of any punishment worse than that…

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