'Sky Sharks' Is A Perfect Example of Bad Bad Taste
“One must remember that there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste..."
By Eric Shorey
Queer filmmaker and cult icon John Waters, an absolute master of purposefully terrible cinema, once asserted that “one must remember that there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste. ... To understand bad taste one must have very good taste … Good bad taste can be creatively nauseating but must, at the same time, appeal to the especially twisted sense of humor, which is anything but universal.” Sky Sharks, a 2020 straight-to-DVD German film, at first glance appears to represent the pinnacle of over-the-top bad taste but is actually just an exercise in both stupidity and tedium.
In the past decade we’ve seen a preponderance of low-budget shark-porn (see: all 6 Sharknado films, Two-Headed Shark Attack, The Meg, Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus, etc…): most of them are purposefully insipid yet harmlessly fun adventures, made essentially as screen-savers for stoned summer parties. At the same time, there’s also been a slightly more absurd (and perhaps pernicious) trend of zombie / nazi movies, including a truly nauseating amount of spinoffs and imitations of the politically questionable Dead Snow franchise.
Sky Sharks unites the disparate universes of shark-schlock and zom-Nazi movies into a seemingly unending parade of terribly acted and tasteless flashbacks that imagine a series of undead experiments perpetrated by Hitler’s secret armies. Harping on the insidious politics of this movie (should Germans really be making light of the Holocaust like this?) is sort of pointless — the world of Sky Sharks is so divorced from anything resembling reality it’s impossible to titrate a discernible morality through all the exploitative shots of fake tits, swastikas, and splashing gore. At least the Nazis are the bad guys, you know?
I can’t believe I’m writing this, but perhaps the biggest problem with Sky Sharks is that it’s barely about flying sharks at all! In fact, the bulk of the movie is spent detailing an incoherent sub-plot about The Third Reich’s clandestine bio-weaponry. Who even cares? If I wanted a movie about Nazi sharks, I would have watched Nazi Sharks!
There’s definitely a handful of ludicrous pleasures in Sky Sharks: the opening scene is so bloody and silly (a buxom sky-shark-riding zombie-nazi takes out an entire airplane full of unwitting passengers) that not laughing is absolutely impossible. But by the time the deformed protagonist is explaining the schematics of The Dead Flesh Project (a secret American counter-weapon utilizing the reanimated corpses of Vietnam Vets) I was actively looking for something else to do. Attempts at Sin City-esque hyper-aestheticization are made throughout, and some of the techno tracks from the movie oddly slap — but anime-inflected CGI backgrounds can’t not make up for all the drudgery. Needless to say, the movie’s runtime of nearly 2 hours is absolutely unjustifiable.
John Waters understands that the purposeful pursuit of bad taste requires a knowledge of beauty: you have to know what you’re fighting against to make the fight even worth it. Sky Sharks isn’t fighting for or against anything. It wishes it was camp. I would say that all that’s left is the gnashing of teeth — but, honestly, there was barely even that.
In one clever moment of self-awareness in Sky Sharks, a disposable side-character gleefully watches a movie called Sky Frogs, in which badly rendered CGI frogs battle against big-titted Amazonian women. I honestly would have rather watched that movie.
FINAL JUDGEMENT: F
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