The creators of “Airplane vs. Volcano” are back with a movie for Sharknado Week. “Dam Sharks!”, or according to IMDB, “Dam Sharks”, is a SyFy channel movie about sharks that use human bodies to build dams. This sounds like a crazy idea and would be even crazier if it was not revealed that the dams are mostly constructed with wood with human remains stuffed between the gaps. Still, there are dams and there are sharks. That’s all that the movie really needs. There is no need for unnecessary dialog. As far as SyFy movies go, you can do much worse.
“Dam Sharks” feels like two movies that are awkwardly joined together. Half of the time is spent focusing on a park ranger who is trying to get rid of sharks inhabiting a river after seeing a scuba diver get torn to shreds. The other half of the movie is about employees from a company taking a day off of work to do some team building exercises in the wild. These scenes are campy which makes them easier to watch, but I do not want to watch employees shoot paintballs at each other, I want to get to the shark action. The characters are forgettable except for one guy that is so cool that he has to take off his sunglasses to reveal his sunglasses. Eventually, the plots cross paths once the employees decide to go rafting.
The shark action in “Dam Sharks” is absurd and that is the way it should be. Sharks routinely appear to jump twenty feet into the air to kill people at the water’s surface. The plan to get rid of the sharks is to destroy the dams. I don’t quite understand how destroying the dams will kill the sharks, but it’s probably best not to question it. Also, the park ranger must be terrible at her job. How can so many people be killed in that river without her or anyone else noticing? Anyways, the plan to destroy the dams is to do it Sharknado style and blow them up. That sounds like a great plan. Taking a boat in shark infested waters to get to the dams, not so much.
This may be the first movie to use the term “Sharknado Week”. While I would prefer not to hear the term in any of these movies again, I enjoy that it is self-aware and does not try to take itself too seriously. In the end, “Dam Sharks” does not live up to the legacy of “Airplane vs. Volcano”, but it is still more entertaining than most SyFy channel movies.
Laneous Missile 