RAIDERS OF THE LOST SHARK (2015) **

Drilling in a Canadian lake awakens a megalodon shark.  Anyone who is dumb enough to go swimming in there (and there’s quite a few) wind up becoming fish food for the prehistoric beast.  A college professor (Candice Lidstone) whose sister was killed by a meg is brought in to help destroy the shark.  Predictably, that’s just when a bunch of her students go out to the lake for a party.

You’ve got to give this movie one thing:  It has a great title.  As for the film itself, it’s about what you’d expect from a sub-SYFY Channel shark movie.  Sure, a lot of it is dumb on purpose, but unlike your typical Sharknado sequel, Raiders of the Lost Shark will every so often manage to squeeze a laugh or two out of you.  

Most of the humor comes at the expense of Canadians.  There are a lot of Canada jokes (one French girl goes topless in the lake and is promptly eaten) and many of the characters sport thick Canadian accents.  It’s almost as if writer/director Brett Kelly was trying to set a record for how many times he could get a Canadian to say “a-boot” in a single scene.

The shark attacks are somewhat fun.  They usually require the ladies in the cast to strip down to their bathing suit (or less) before going swimming and being eaten.  I don’t want to get into spoiler territory (then again, why worry about spoilers when you’re talking about a movie called Raiders of the Lost Shark?), but the ending is flat-out ridiculous.  It’s here where we learn a mad scientist has genetically engineered the shark to become a flying killer.  While the CGI shark attack scenes on the lake were passable at best, the flying shark effects are just the pits.  

That last paragraph may or may not make you want to see Raiders of the Lost Shark even more.  Your mileage may vary, of course, but as for me, there was some amusement to be found here.  As far as these things go, you can do a helluva lot worse.