Mark Reviews Movies: MANEATER

Maneater, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 25, 2022

The problem with the influx of semi-ironically, intentionally bad monster movies is when something like Maneater comes along. To be sure, the movie is a bad—really bad—one about a giant shark that can gobble up an entire person in just a few bites. The visual effects are, if one is being generous, cheap. The performances are almost as awkward as the staging, and the tone shifts so drastically between its two plot threads that it's impossible to tell if writer/director Justin Lee is taking the material seriously or only having a laugh about seeming to take it seriously.

This has been the case with those schlocky examples of low-budget monster movies that are self-aware of their cheapness, silliness, and general absence of quality. If the joke is that the movie takes itself seriously about being bad, does that change the fact that it's awful? It doesn't, and if the joke only that, the gag runs thin very quickly.

Here, it's still tough to determine what Lee's intentions actually are. We get one plot, which follows Jessie (Nicky Whelan) and her seemingly disposable—because they are, although it takes a while for them to be dispatched in shockingly rapid succession—friends on a tropical vacation. Jessie was dumped by her fiancé, and the trip was meant to be her honeymoon. Instead, she's on a generically idyllic island with a group of friends.

The extent of their characters is a scene where everything stops so that Sunny (Porscha Coleman) can say she's in real estate, Will (Shane West) can point out he's a sleazy lawyer, and the rest may or may not say their occupations before the little round-robin bout of exposition is finished. After a while of the same shots and editing patterns conveying useless information, the mind does admittedly wander. Besides, how can one care about the careers of obvious pieces of shark fodder in a movie that clearly doesn't care about these pieces of meat, either?

We know most or all of them are doomed from the start, because Lee opens his movie with a scene of a diver coming face-to-toothy-face with the massive jaws of the man-eating shark and being chomped before we even know there's something scary supposed to happen. The shark keeps popping up, sometimes out of the blue and occasionally with a little bit of setup. The disparate tones of those different approaches points to one of the movie's biggest downfalls: At times, the shark attacks are meant to be quick gags, and at others, they're definitely not.

Within a few minutes, for example, we get the shark jumping out of the water to swallow a cliff-diver whole and the same shark tormenting the teenage daughter of the second protagonist, before it tears her into pieces. The other main character is Harlan, and he's played by Trace Adkins—yes, the country singer and, more recently, actor—sporting long hair that seems to disappear as soon as he puts on a baseball cap. The shark killed his daughter a week prior to Jessie and her friends' arrival. He wants vengeance.

A lot of time, then, is spent with Harlan looking for the shark and the friend group sitting around a boat operated by Captain Wally (Ed Morrone) and his lady-friend Beth (Kim DeLonghi). The movie was obviously made in a rush and with a limited budget—most of which must have gone toward the digital shark and a distracting shot of a computer-generated torso in some computer-generated water.

In case that isn't apparent, Lee has an entire scene of the group looking at a bunch of sharks being lured to a nearby boat. Note that the scene is of the group "looking at a bunch of sharks," because, no, the production either didn't bother or couldn't afford to obtain shots of real sharks or digitally create any more than the one that matters for the plot.

Anyway, more people are killed by the shark—reactions of soon-to-be victims being calmly unaware and immediately nearby witnesses screaming excessively vary depending, apparently, on who was available each day. Jessie and her pals end up stranded on a remote island, just before a lot of them are killed off in gruesome ways because of increasingly unnecessary decisions (Who goes half skinny dipping—and that particular half, by the way?). During the climax, Harlan and Jessie come up with a plan to kill the shark that seems to add about five steps more than is required.

Is Meaneater funny? It is. Is it terrible? It certainly is. As for whether it was meant to be both of those things, who knows, and more importantly, who cares?

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