If you’ve sought out any of Mark Polonia‘s previous microbudget (at best) horror releases, you know what quality ceiling to expect from Cocaine Shark. The movie costs as much as the animation to manipulate Cocaine Bear’s left paw for thirty seconds, maybe even less. Polonia’s signature is churning out poster-perfect titles like Amityville in Space or Sharkula with table-scrap resources, which only sometimes deliver as advertised. Cocaine Shark artwork features a ferocious Great White surrounded by bricks of floating white powder but narratively follows a story that aligns more with Joe Dante’s blink-and-miss laboratory creation in Piranha. It’s “Cocaine Shark” in name and marketing alone, undeniably zany with a less-financially-endowed Troma aroma, but ultimately uninteresting as dull dialogue dominates the seventy-minute duration.
Bando Glutz‘s screenplay blends Deep Blue Sea and Synchronic as an East Coast drug kingpin unleashes a “highly addictive stimulant,” HT25. The narcotic achieves an addictive euphoric sensation but has an odd side effect — the user hallucinates out-of-body shark attacks. That’s because the drug is derived from captive sharks, enhanced by psychotropic nanotechnology and other science-y words unconvincingly delivered by Polonia’s cast. It’s up to undercover cop Nick Braddock (Titus Himmelberger) to infiltrate the organization behind HT25, which he already did or didn’t do, because we meet Braddock bound to a hospital bed, recalling-slash-narrating the events of Cocaine Shark in an attempt to clear hazy amnesia.
I can’t stress this enough — this isn’t Universal’s Cocaine Shark. If you require a million-dollar-plus baseline of production quality in your movies, swim in the other direction. Polonia makes movies in backyards or presumably loaned vacation homes, crafting special effects with hand puppets, and won’t be achieving the success of one-in-a-million $10K overachievers like Paranormal Activity. There are parts of Cocaine Shark that would be laughed out of film studies programs should they be submitted for evaluation, but that’s partly the point. Cocaine Shark only aims to be a schlocky throwback to after-dark SYFY specials that maximize conceptual intrigue for the cost of pocket change, missing the mark by a submarine’s length.
The sparkless Cocaine Shark doesn’t boast the necessary commitment of, say, a gore-and-puppets creature feature like Llamageddon or the endearingly sweet Baby Frankenstein. Cocaine Shark attempts to surface absurd mutant experiments from the half-shark, half-human hybrid that’s like an after-school crafts club trying to make a Street Sharks costume or the fully toy-sized “Crab Shark” that’s shown a handful of times as the main antagonist. Unfortunately, the film fails because these somewhat bad-good creature designs are overshadowed by the bait-and-switch detective investigation angle between nondescript characters running an unremarkable drug operation. Cocaine Shark is as much a film about cocaine and sharks as 2020’s Spree is about the tart candy, capitalizing on the scuttlebutt around Elizabeth Banks’ big-studio Cocaine Bear.
You don’t need billion-dollar investors to produce a successful movie, but Cocaine Shark just ain’t it. One single conversation between two characters will be cut incoherently back and forth (presuming both actors couldn’t be physically present), lightning goes from white-out to noticeably dim, and video quality won’t remain consistent (imagine edits back-and-forth between digital camcorders and outdated iPhones) — Polonia’s doing what he can with extremely little, which shows in the wrong ways. We’re here to witness hybrid sea monsters attack their seedy creators, but instead get a plodding narration over poorly acted power struggles between law enforcement, backwoods mafiosos, and drug smugglers. The few bloody wounds we see look like ketchup streaks, there’s no real “action” outside a few seconds of Crab Shark munching on crude claymation victims, and that’s basically all. It’s the kind of movie that distinguishes between the good guys and bad guys with backward hats (that’s how you can tell the t-shirted expert hitman apart from everyone else), lacking the ooey-gooey cheese factor of something like kitchen-sink monster mash Mutant Blast. For a movie with “cocaine” in the title, there’s a shocking lack of energy or adrenaline.
Truthfully, Cocaine Shark feels like a dusty finished-yet-shelved title that could immediately pass with a ripoff Cocaine Bear cover to capitalize on popular culture. Did I chuckle at the goofy stop-motion-clunky creatures inserted into scenes with what looks like the free online version of video editing software? Sure, especially when thinking about how Ray Harryhausen would react. Is Cocaine Shark otherwise an imposter masquerading as a drug-fueled creature feature that’s anything but? Between all the embarrassingly indecipherable accents from actors, usage of random B-roll, and bottom-of-the-barrel horror noir storytelling, Cocaine Shark sinks like Titanic 666.
Cocaine Shark is currently available on Tubi and snorts its way onto DVD and VOD on July 11, 2023.
