Shark Spotlight: House Shark
by Emily Nagle
Welcome back to another installment of Shark Spotlight! Today we’ll be discussing “House Shark“.
“House Shark” tells the story of Frank (Trey Harrison), a former cop who discovers a vicious land shark invading his home, and recruits the help of Abraham (Wes Reid) and shark expert Zachary (Michael Merchant) to eradicate the threat.
Even while knowing “House Shark” is intentionally crummy, it’s tough to get through, because the humor isn’t clever. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought it was just bad because it was bad.
The movie I discussed in yesterday’s Shark Spotlight, “Bad CGI Sharks”, is drastically different, but I’m going to briefly compare the humor in it to that of “House Shark”; the reason why the humor worked was because it was extremely self-aware, riffing on other shark movies. Meanwhile, “House Shark” overdoes pretty much everything from acting to gore, but doesn’t make it as clear that it’s for comedic purposes. Like, the movie has some weird fixation on going to the bathroom, since that’s where the shark first shows up.
Like a lot of sharksploitation movies, “House Shark” has overdramatic acting and crude visual effects that are bad for a reason; it’s for satirical purposes, poking fun at the tropes often used in the genre. However, the whole shtick quickly grows stale, because the movie is super long. “House Shark” clocks in at an hour and 52 minutes – nearly two hours of a low-budget movie (even if it’s intentionally cheap-looking) is just way too long. I found my attention wavering at various points during the film, because it seemed to drag at times; ideally, these kinds of movies should be kept to an hour and a half at the most.
Maybe this is just one of those bad movies that you can’t watch while sober. Some of the reviews I read for this film said similar things; one user on Letterboxd even compared the viewing experience to “[taking] edibles and it’s gone horribly wrong.” So who knows? One thing’s for sure: “House Shark” is truly all over the place (just like blood and guts for almost the whole movie).
Tune in tomorrow to see what’s next on Shark Spotlight! Until then, if you want to experience some gory, shark-infested chaos, House Shark is free to watch on Galxy.