Dinoshark (2010)

 

Pliosaurs were ancient marine predators that grew to lengths of up to 15 metres (50 ft).  They went extinct around 100 million years ago.

But in this movie, one example of the species was cryogenically frozen in the arctic ice.  When global warming melts the glacier in which it was frozen, the creature revives.  A few years later, the now fully grown  predator arrives off the Mexico cost, where it soon proves itself absurdly fond of attacking and eating any human it encounters.

Local bad boy Trace McGraw is the first one to survive an encounter with the beast, but given his history with the local authorities, he has a great deal of trouble convincing them to listen.  Can he find a way to stop the Dinoshark before it kills again?  Or at least, before the movie ends?

This low-budget monster movie is produced by industry veteran Roger Corman.  Corman's followed the same basic "make it as cheap as possible, as fast as possible" approach to film since 1954, and there's little sign here that the leopard has changed its spots.  The movie smacks of high budget conscious decision-making on several levels.

The CGI, for instance, is pretty much exactly what you would expect from a no-budget project.  The basic design of the dinoshark itself doesn't look too bad, probably because it's not that hard to stick an allosaurus head stuck on a shark's body, but as soon as you see the creature move, it's very obviously not real and doesn't look remotely convincing. The film's (regrettably few) old-school practical effects look a lot better.

Probably the most Corman-tastic section in the film is a party scene where the band are playing too loud.  This allows blatant padding to the film's run time by forcing characters to repeat themselves; a minute or so is even devoted to having one of the characters ask the band to reduce the volume so they can hear each other. 

There's also a fair bit of padding in the profusion of scenes where some random people turn up on screen for the first time in the movie and then promptly get eaten. Sure, these films have been doing that ever since the days of Jaws, but not quite so often or so like clockwork. This is very much "no-one got chomped in the last 10 minutes? Better throw someone to the shark" territory.

Speaking the granddaddy of killer shark films, there are several unsubtle  and not terribly funny Jaws references in the score and dialogue, with the most blatant being "you're going to need a bigger chopper".  Few of these really land as anything more than a gratuitous film nerd reference, though.

Ultimately, one to skip unless you're desperate to see dependable TV actor Eric Balfour slumming it in a second rate creature feature.

My favourite part of the film?  The line of dialogue where someone talks about the dinoshark being sighted in New Zealand, and then shows a map depicting Papua New Guinea, which is some 5,000 km (3,000 miles) from the land of the long white cloud.