SHARK HUNTER (2001) ** First off, let me just say this: I basically think that the idea of making bad movies on purpose is a commendable one. And certainly, Matt Codd, whose Epoch is a modern genre masterpiece, has more than a few good ideas on the subject. Here, for example, the concept of shooting underwater scenes where the actors aren't even in the water-simply incredible, brilliant, brilliant. The other major experiment with the actors didn't work as well. They'd all obviously over-studied the history of bad films and determined to deliver their lines in a similarly overwraught manner. Christian Toulali and Heather Marie Marsden were particularly pronounced in this regard, and she complemented the histrionics with spectacularly ridiculous faces in the...um, face...of horror...which was funny. But when you have a film about an 80 foot shark and a bunch of stick characters battling it from a submarine, it isn't entirely self-defeating if your actors deliver their preposterous lines well. Of course it's more important that they do so naturally than well. Or is it? I'm not sure, but there was something pasted-on about the effect of their melodrama, and not entirely pleasing. They can't let on so obviously that they're in on the joke, anyway. Also, whoever wrote the plot didn't give them enough historic stupidity to work with, I mean there was some, and some of it was very funny, but ultimately it turned into a film in which your popcorn was just as important.
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