An angry nun summons the devil to possess a shark. Chaos ensues. Shark Exorcist (2015) was written and directed by Donald Farmer, whose previous work includes Catnado and Hooker With a Hacksaw. It stars Angela Kerecz as Ali, a young woman who becomes posessed by the evil shark, and her husband Bobby Kerecz as Father Michael, a priest called in to exorcise the demon.
You might think Sharktopus was a bad movie, but this is on a whole other level. The budget is obviously tiny, the acting is awful, and the writing is hopefully deliberately bad, sometimes hilariously so. The fact that the shark is in a lake instead of the ocean is the least ridiculous thing about this movie.
The demon shark is purely CGI, without so much as a plastic fin for the the actors to react to. You never see it actually attack anyone. The characters just thrash around in the water and/or die off screen as we watch other characters respond to this. The evil nun stabs people in such a tight close up that you can't see what is happening.
It's quite a bit more exploitative than Sharktopus. Lots of women in bikinis are to be expected in a shark movie, but this movie takes it further with scenes that look as though the actors thought they were on a porn shoot. There is however, no actual nudity, which just made those scenes really weird.
This actress is making the same face as I was by this point in the movie.
Since they couldn't afford to record sound during outdoor shoots there are long sequences of characters just miming things to a spooky soundtrack, giving me flashbacks to politely watching some ambitiously arty student films at university. There is even an infuriatingly pointless post credits sequence in which we watch a woman admire and touch toy sharks in an aquarium bookshop for five straight minutes. Eat your heart out, Michael Haneke!
I'm a bit confused as to what actually happened plot-wise since there were subplots that went nowhere, weird smash cuts and it was sometimes hard to tell some of the characters apart, but I don't suppose it really matters.
The dialogue cracked me up at times. My favourite part of this exchange between two characters:
Bikini girl 1: You're not the world's best listener.
Bikini girl 2: I am a good listener!
Bikini girl 1: Um, then, close your eyes... What colour is my swimsuit?
My main beef with this movie was that it does not do what it says on the tin. From the title, I wanted to see either somebody exorcising a shark, or even better, a shark performing an exorcism. Neither of those things happens, which would make me feel ripped off if I hadn't watched it for free.
Shark Exorcist had enough going on that I kept watching until the end, but I would only recommend it if you truly enjoy watching bad movies. It is currently streaming on Tubi.
Content Warning:
Vomit - Several characters vomit, and at one point a woman does this right into another woman's face.
Voyeurism- There is one scene I found genuinely unsettling, which seemed to belong in a different movie, in which a man crept up to a sleeping woman and took pictures of her while breathing heavily.
