Shark Spotlight: Raiders of the Lost Shark
by Emily Nagle
Today on Shark Spotlight, we’re discussing the sci-fi horror film “Raiders of the Lost Shark”!
To set the scene, this movie is about a group of four friends who take a boat to a private island for a vacation. It’s all going smoothly until they discover a genetically engineered killer shark is on the loose, and now it’s up to them to defeat it.
Despite its title being a play on “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, the movie doesn’t even come close to spoofing it. Which is kind of weird. I mean, maybe the boat that our heroes take to the island could be considered an ark. But don’t be fooled by the title; it’s nothing like the Indiana Jones movie. You could probably say the same thing about “Sharks of the Corn”, but at least that movie actually had cornfields in it. “Raiders of the Lost Shark” is not an action-packed adventure.
It’s got awful visuals, with terribly animated sharks (and not terrible in a good way, like the ones in “Bad CGI Sharks”!) and shark attack scenes that look like they’re made on one of those free iPhone apps. Like, we’ll see a shark leaping out of the water, and then 3 seconds later it’ll cut back to perfectly calm water. The poorly animated shark attacks scenes are hilarious, and definitely my favorite part of the whole movie.
Another wonderfully bizarre aspect of the movie is how the characters keep taking their clothes off. All the female characters try to be sexy about it, and for some reason they always magically have swimsuits on under their clothes. Almost 100% of the time, though, it’s just super awkward. Like, they’ll freak out when someone else gets attacked by a shark, but then take their time removing their clothes before wading into the water to investigate the incident. It makes absolutely no sense, and it’s amazing.
The last two shark movies I watched, “House Shark” and “Sharks of the Corn”, both faced the problem of being way too long for a low-budget horror film. It was refreshing to find out that “Raiders of the Lost Shark” is only 70 minutes long. Sure, it’s shorter than the average hour-and-a-half to two hour runtime that feature films typically have, but for the purposes of being a movie that doesn’t take itself seriously, this is perfect. It’s not so long to the point where the joke gets dragged on.
With all this being said, I rank “Raiders of the Lost Shark” as Galxy’s second-best shark movie! It’s just the right length for over-acted, poorly-animated chaos (even if it doesn’t live up to its name). Here’s an updated ranking:
4. House Shark
3. Sharks of the Corn
2. Raiders of the Lost Shark
1. Bad CGI Sharks
“Raiders of the Lost Shark” is free to watch on Galxy, as are all the other above movies!