Just about every movie about a rampaging shark can be described as a descendant of Jaws. Half a century later, the blood that Steven Spielberg spilled in the water is still drawing pretenders from the lower rungs of the food chain.
But how many of these bastard offspring have the chutzpah to directly quote the alpha predator that spawned them, the summer sensation that launched a thousand ship destroyers? Maneater, an abysmal new addition to the evolutionary line, dares to court direct comparisons with a parting line about the insufficient size of a boat. It’s like watching a minnow try to pass for a Megalodon.
Shark movies now arrive with a regularity that makes the Marvel assembly line look sluggish. They come in all shapes and sizes: While Hollywood unleashes variations expensive (The Meg) and relatively frugal (47 Meters Down) nearly every summer, the schlockmeisters at Syfy and The Asylum keep Redboxes and streaming libraries stocked with an endless supply of Z-grade fin flicks. Some even come courtesy of Roger Corman, godfather of B-horror and producer of one of the very best Jaws clones, the original 1978 Piranha. It seems rather unlikely that he’ll find the next Joe Dante (or Francis Ford Coppola) on the set of a Sharkopus sequel.
Maneater, which swims ominously into theaters and home-viewing platforms this weekend, is a very small fish in that pond. It’s at least the fifth shark-related thriller to drop this year alone, arriving in the wake of bottom feeders like Shark Bait, The Requin, and the hilarious-sounding Sharkula. (Isn’t a vampiric shark kind of redundant?) There’s no high-concept twist to this one—no digital cyclone sending the rubbery eating machine airborne, no prehistoric origin story for the beast, no rival monstrosity for it to battle. Maneater sticks to the basics of the formula: balmy backdrop, bikined cast, and big fish.
Like most movies from this particular school of cheapo pulp, Maneater actually owes a greater debt of influence to the second Jaws, which dunked Spielberg’s ultimate movie monster into the sea-faring equivalent of a teen slasher movie. On the menu here is a generic gaggle of friends, ranging in age from their 20s to their 40s, played by photogenic actors hitting the bottom of the chum barrel in unison. (What wrong turn led you to this bum gig, Shane West?) The group has gathered in Hawaii to help Jessie (Nicky Whelan) get over the ex-fiancé who dumped her before the wedding. This kind of tedious backstory motivation is often supplied to the heroes of slicker shark fare; as Blake Lively and Jason Statham can attest, escaping the snapping mouth of a leviathan is a great shortcut to therapeutic progress.
It’s a great white, killing for sport instead of food, that ruins Jessie and company’s vacation—though not before junk-merchant writer-director Justin Lee (Final Kill) has padded out the slim runtime with robotically banal conversation and montages set to stock music-library pop cues. The prey receives a belated lifeline from requisite Quint figure Harlan, a grizzled shark expert played by country-music veteran Trace Adkins. Harlan’s got a personal beef with the beast, which chomps up his daughter in one of the first of the film’s atrocious attack scenes—choppy, barely intelligible blurs of gnashing teeth, captured in extreme close-up and through clouds of billowing fake blood.
The shark looks terrible, too. Though Maneater can claim no relation to the blackly comic Jaws-inspired video game of the same name, its effects work has a very Playstation 2 quality, especially during an embarrassingly phony money shot of the monster leaping up to snatch a cliff diver straight out of the air. Every glimpse of this chintzy CGI creation leaves one with a greater appreciation for the way Spielberg kept his marauding great white out of sight, working around a malfunctioning animatronic by turning its absence into a source of mounting suspense. To be fair, Maneater does take a page from that book at least once: When the fun-loving booze-cruise captain (Ed Morrone) starts pointing out species of shark in the water, Lee keeps the camera locked on the actors, never once cutting to the animals they’re supposedly oohing and ahhing at. That’s one way to save a few bucks.
Of course, shoddiness is arguably the hook of a movie like Maneater. In the wake of the runaway success of the Sharknado films, audiences might look to these lowest-rent potboilers more for laughs than scares. But the best quips amateur MST3Kers can muster would be wasted on such run-of-the-mill crap. Mostly, Maneater is a bore, slowly dog-paddling through its 86-minute runtime, with all the flat travelog scenery of an Olsen twins vehicle that’s been splashed with some cut-rate splatter. Only Adkins, cursing like a real-life Crashmore, ever threatens to make the movie “so bad it’s good,” as opposed to just plain bad.
Still, look past the sub-professional qualities of Maneater (like a shotgun that sounds like it’s firing caps), and there are hints of why this kind of movie endures on the modern equivalent of video-store shelves, outlasting the Blockbusters where it once thrived, popular in apparent perpetuity. What Jaws tapped into nearly 50 years ago was the sensible fear that we’re sitting ducks in the water, vulnerable to whatever swims beneath. Its countless offspring have combined that anxiety with the promise of beach-party fun—the inviting pleasures of hot bodies and cold drinks in the sun, enjoyed in an air-conditioned room during the dog days, offering a bottled taste of summer once the temperatures begin to dip. Even the worst shark movie can trigger a few shivers of enjoyment, of Galeophobia spiked with vicarious bliss.
Maneater probably isn’t the worst shark movie. It might not even be the worst shark movie of the year. But it is the kind of basically meritless, bargain-basement trash that gets by only on its title and a poster image of a scantily clad someone on the water, drifting unwittingly into the outline of a giant, gaping maw. It’s a timewaster that assumes no greater demand from its target audience than the promise that, yes, there will be a killer shark. But audiences ravenous for aquatic terror need not settle for scraps. There’s a better shark movie coming to IMAX (and 3D) screens near them on Labor Day weekend. It’s called Jaws, and a lifetime later, it still eats guppies like Maneater for breakfast.
