Remember when everyone was making movies based on the novels of master of horror Steven Kang? This is a flick based on one of Kang’s early short stories. It harkens… or should I say… “sharkens” back to the days when he wasn’t so overly commercialized.
It starts with off great with a T & A update of the opening scene in Jaws… except… you know… in a cornfield instead of a beach. A guy passes out drunk while his naked girlfriend (Rebecca Rhinehart from CarousHELL 2) flaunts around the corn rows until she’s eaten by a shark. There are also amusing shots of fin buzzing above the corn stalks and the shark’s face as it runs through the corn maze. Or the maize maze, as it were. Right then and there, I thought we had a classic on our hands. Or at the very least, another Shark Side of the Moon.
That was until the B plot about a serial killer who thinks he’s a shark took over. This guy wears a shark face mask and lures prostitutes to his room where he cuts them up with a set of shark jaws. This stuff isn’t necessarily bad per se, but it’s nowhere near as fun as the cornfield-set scenes. Incidentally, this plotline is not found in Kang’s original short story. Nor is the subplot involving a juice head trying to sell off a Stonehenge-related relic to some gangsters. I guess the filmmakers had to pad it out a little, but there was no reason this thing had to be one-hundred-and-five minutes long.
See, when the movie is nothing but morons stumbling into the cornfield and being mauled by sharks, it works. All the extraneous shit just bogs everything down. There’s also a plot twist that makes absolutely no sense. Then again, just when I was about to completely write it off, something amazing cheesy or… corny… if you will… would happen (like a shark jumping out of the cornfield and into the air, causing a helicopter to explode) to kind of keep things in check.
That said, it’s maybe a little too overstuffed for its own good. I admire the kitchen sink approach (Bigfoot even shows up at one point), but the unwieldy running time eventually does it in. Still, there’s plenty of Jaws references and in-joke character names to keep you amused. That, and the occasional intentionally funny line like, “What in the name of Randy Travis is going on here?”
AKA: Steven Kang’s Sharks of the Corn.
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