Verdict
Summary
First time director Jerry Dugan has a difficult time with pacing and giving his movie enough energy to carry your interest, but if you’re devoted to Dolph you’ll sit there and go the distance despite how pedestrian it feels.
Plot: Fiercely protective single-mom Meredith Hendricks happens to also be the best cop in her quiet town on Lake Tahoe. When a black-market exotic species dealer named Clint, is paroled from prison, something he let loose begins to make its presence known. Swimmers and land-lovers alike begin to become part of the food chain at an unbelievable rate. Meredith and the new man in her life, a biologist named Peter, begin to investigate these brutal attacks and discover that they’re not just hunting one eating machine, but a whole family of them. After a documentary crew is devoured when they don’t take the threat seriously, it’s up to Meredith, Peter, and the unlikely hero, Clint, to stop the most dangerous thing on the planet: A mother protecting its young. Not everyone will make it out alive, but those who do will never forget this summer at Shark Lake.
Review: Small time criminal and negligent father Clint Gray (Dolph Lundgren) is arrested after a sloppy car chase where he drives his van into Lake Tahoe. He’s promptly arrested and sent to prison for selling exotic animals on the black market and for putting his daughter Carly in harms way. Five years later and with a better outlook on life, Clint is paroled, and he’s humbled that the tough female cop – Meredith Hernandez (Sara Malakul Lane) – who arrested him adopted his daughter Carly (played by Lily Brooks O’Brient) and is doing a damn fine job being a mother to her.
All Clint wants from Hernandez is an opportunity to meet with his daughter and try to make amends, but knowing the kind of man he used to be, she keeps her distance from him and tries to get a court order against him. But this is just family drama; there’s a bigger issue at stake when Lake Tahoe is revealed to be the buffet bar for a trio of bull sharks who have been biding their time for the right moment to start chowing down on human legs, arms, and whatever else is poking through from the surface.
As it turns out, when Clint drove his van into the lake, there was a pregnant shark in the cab, and now that it’s five years later the mamma shark has been keeping her two offspring company and now’s as good a time as any to start the feeding frenzy. With Clint on the path to redemption, and Officer Hernandez on the warpath to save the lake from any more fatalities, the future is pretty bright for these characters.
If you’re going to make a movie called Shark Lake and have it star someone as towering and iconic as Dolph Lundgren, the very least the filmmakers could have done is have him wrestle with one of the creatures in the same (or similar) way that Richard Keil wrestled and bit one in The Spy Who Loved Me. What a showstopper that would have been. But, alas, that wasn’t to be. Shark Lake is a nice enough time waster with Dolph going through the motions and giving his slightly interesting role some panache, but all the stuff with the computer generated sharks is merely adequate. He gets to tussle with one and gets bit on the shoulder, but being the true grit that he is, he winces and passes it off as a flesh wound. The whole look and feel of the movie is strictly direct-to-video with a late 90’s feel to it, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
First time director Jerry Dugan has a difficult time with pacing and giving his movie enough energy to carry your interest, but if you’re devoted to Dolph you’ll sit there and go the distance despite how pedestrian it feels. He has a nice three-way fight scene with a couple of home invaders in one scene, but other than that, there’s not much in the action category. Amazingly, this received a one-week theatrical release, which accounted for three theatrical releases for Dolph in 2015. The other two were Skin Trade and War Pigs. That’s impressive.
