Shark Encounters of the Third Kind kicks off with a pretty funny pre-credits scene where a diver and a sexy gal in a bikini become victims of a shitty-looking CGI shark. Then, the plot begins. An alien spacecraft lands on the bottom of the ocean near a seaside community almost exclusively inhabited by people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs. The aliens have returned to Earth for some unfinished business and use sharks to protect their ship from detection.
Or something like that. None of this makes much sense, to be honest. It’s almost as if the filmmakers started making an alien movie and got halfway through and decided, “What the hell? Let’s toss some sharks in there!”
If you can’t already tell, this is another Polonia Brothers jam. It’s an odd mix of nutty premise and inconsistent execution. Some of the green-screened effects are laughable, while others aren’t too shabby. The alien masks are pretty good, but the CGI UFO ship is cheesy, and not exactly in a good way. The shark effects are likewise all over the map. Some of the shots are passable and others are incompetent. The rubber shark used for the inserts and close-ups isn’t very convincing either. I will admit the effects in the scene where our hero dispatches a shark with a flare gun are pretty damned funny though.
When the action switches to dry land, things are just as inconsistent, if not more. Much of the human interaction feels forced and phony, but some of the random ass shit, like the crazy cat lady who… uh… marks her territory every time she buries a dead cat is somewhat amusing. Heck, some parts even manage to be moderately effective, like when a swimmer narrowly escapes the jaws of a shark and makes her way to shore… only to be confronted by aliens and driven back into the shark-infested sea. I also sort of dug the Fire in the Sky-inspired flashbacks/nightmares.
As far as Mark Polonia movies go, Shark Encounters of the Third Kind is far from his worst, but there are plenty of other fish in the sea.
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