A Terrible & Lazy B-Movie

With the success of Cocaine Bear in the theaters earlier this year, it was only a matter of time before other animals fell victim to narcotics and B-movie excess.

A cocaine shark is the logical next step. After all, sharks have an ocean of B-movies to their name — from Sharknado to Shark Exorcist. And just before Cocaine Bear premiered, New Zealand police discovered over three tons of cocaine floating in the ocean. Cocaine shark memes soon followed, naturally.

But Cocaine Shark, from director Mark Polonia, isn’t a story of sharks who can’t say ‘no’ to drugs. It centers on a narcotic made from shark gland, the gangsters eager to traffic it, and the hapless mutant-shark-thing caught in the middle.

The story isn’t what you probably expect. First off, there are no actual sharks in this film. There are shark mutants, yes, but not even a bit of fearsome shark b-roll. The majority of the film deals with the absurd story of gangsters trying to smuggle the shark drug. To make things more complicated, the story is told in flashbacks from by an undercover narcotics detective. Instead, he gets captured and recounts his story under the haze of drugs.

Cocaine Shark is bad. Really, really bad. It’s not even “so bad it’s good,” it’s just “so bad it’s bad.” The “plot” is nonsensical, with random actors and scenes thrown in with virtually no reason or logic. It comes across as a cheap gangster movie the producers threw hokey monster scenes in to cash in on the SEO-friendly title.

Anything one could call “filmcraft” is amateur at best. Camerawork is poor, with cheap and ugly digital photography. The acting is flat across the board, with actors so focused on saying the right words they don’t put any life into it. Many of the scenes are over-lit, with characters shiny, orange, blown out, or some combination of the three.

But let’s talk about the monsters. Even a terrible movie can be enjoyable with fun monster sequences to support it. Cocaine Shark follows mutant sharks that have escaped into the greater population. This includes a Man Shark (read: guy in a cheap rubber mask) and a Crab Shark, which looks like a Play-Doh toy. There’s also a bat-spider hybrid creation that makes no sense – it’s not a shark – but you only see this creature in a single still-frame at the top of the movie. A pity — it’s the best design in the whole thing.

The monster scenes were few and far between. Every once in a while, there’s a shot of a cheap shark monster “swimming” across the screen. This same shot is repeated over and over, often times with no narrative explanation. I would estimate that there was only about 5% of screen time devoted to monsters. I can appreciate terrible effects (and these are ghastly), but these were almost non-existent.