SHARK EXORCIST (2015) * ½

A killer nun (named Linda Blair!) makes a human sacrifice at a lake.  One year later, a giant shark with glowing eyes starts eating swimmers.  A trio of friends go to the lake, and one of them is bitten by the phantom shark.  Her bite miraculously disappears a few days later and she begins acting strange.  A priest, whose brother was also a victim of the shark, comes to town looking to send the shark’s spirit back to Hell.

The early scenes have sort of a screwball charm to them.  Unfortunately, the plot is all over the place, and things get increasingly incoherent as it goes along.  It sometimes feels like writer/director Donald (Hooker with a Hacksaw) Farmer just strung a bunch of unrelated short films together as he keeps introducing more and more characters who never intersect (and very few of them were even necessary).  

The most memorable character is Nancy (Roni Jonah), a sexy redhead reality show host.  She’s the star of “Ghost Whackers” and tries to make a mental connection with the shark.  The sight of Jonah (who kind of looks like Bella Thorne) writhing around on the ground, arms flailing, and yelling, “Spirit, come inside me!” is amusing, but that’s about as good as it gets, I’m afraid.

The shark itself isn’t bad, especially compared to the sharks featured in so many of the other movies from the ‘10s that have the word “Shark” in the title.  It just doesn’t have a lot of personality.  We also don’t see enough of it to make much of a difference anyway.

Farmer spends most of the running time on the various subplots.  Once he finally sets his sights on the usual Exorcist-type shenanigans (there is a pea soup-puking scene), it still comes up short.  The big exorcism finale winds up being nothing more than a priest exorcising a girl who’s possessed by a shark.  This is disappointing, especially for anyone hoping the priest would be exorcising an actual shark.

Shark Exorcist is far from Farmer’s worse, but it never lives up to the potential.  It also suffers from offscreen kills and skimpy gore.  (In one scene, a shark bite is signified by a dollop of fake blood on a girl’s leg.)  It’s only seventy minutes, but it feels much longer.  There’s not one but two post-credits scenes (one features a girl wandering around an aquarium gift shop), which helps to pad out the running time. Both of them are equally pointless.

As bad as most of Shark Exorcist is, I have to tip my hat to Farmer for writing such howlers as, “That’s the thing about almost dying, Emily:  It’s a real buzz kill!”