When assigned movies to review, I usually have a hard time deciding where to begin. With the fact that most of the films I end up reviewing end up being endurance tests of my will to sit through crap, determining which movie to start with can be like deciding whether I want to get punched in the right eye, the left eye, or kicked in the groin. Which is to say, none of the options are particularly enticing. With some trepidation, I started with 6-Headed Shark Attack. When I saw it was made by The Asylum, peddlers of such rip-offs like Transmorphers, I began to wonder if I made a terrible mistake.
On Isla Corazon, a fellow named William runs some kind of couples retreat meant to help them get over their relationship issues and reconnect with each other. However, William’s own wife is divorcing him, the people that he’s trying to help can be difficult to work with, and his clients start getting killed by a 6-headed shark. The shark, it turns out, is the result of a U.S. government secret genetic experiment that’s gotten loose. Because of course, it is.
After watching the movie, I couldn’t help but think that it seemed like the kind of movie you’d end up watching on SyFy channel, and, as it turns out, I was not wrong. It showed up on that channel under the monicker “Mutant Shark”. I’m not sure why they felt the need to slap another name on it. At least the name was accurate, the film definitely involves a mutant shark. However, the title 6-Headed Shark Attack is less generic and more to the point. The movie also has the hallmarks of a Syfy movie: shoddy acting, cliche characters and plot points, poor writing, and cheap special effects. Yet it manages to hover somewhere in that middle ground of being awful and mildly competent.
The story isn’t going to win awards for originality. After all, it dips into that well of the U.S. government having a top-secret project that created a monster that goes amok that so many other films have drawn from. The majority of the characters are underdeveloped stereotypes with no depth or growth. They really are there to get mowed down by the shark, so the film doesn’t spend much time making them particularly interesting. Sadly, this means that we don’t really care about their fates for the most part. Only two of them I found annoying enough to want to see them get killed by the titular monster of this movie, and only two I kind of wanted to see live. The rest were … well, they were there. That’s about as much as I can say for them.