Swamp Shark
Swamp Shark
R | 25 June 2011 (USA)
Swamp Shark Trailers

Open on gorgeous swamplands of the Atchafalaya Basin in the summer. Lots of beautiful teens are at the beach the weekend before Gator Fest. That night an animal smuggling deal goes wrong and a large sea creature escapes into a swampy backwoods river. At the McDaniel's "Gator Shack" restaurant, a local, Jackson is drunk, and gets mangled to bits. The town sheriff blames the carnage on the McDaniel's "escaped" pack of gators and tries hauling them off to jail. Rachel McDaniel, head of the family, claims to have seen the fin of a shark! Rachel and her family, along with the help of a mysterious stranger, Charlie, take on the Swampshark and the law to clear their names, save Rachel's kid sister Krystal and prevent the unwitting folks at the upcoming Gator Fest from being torn to shreds by a beast the likes of which no one has ever seen!

Reviews
Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews
Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.
Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.
Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.
danumber40 This movie is rated R only for the brief instances of gore, I would assume, and maybe for the very brief nudity. There were several scenes with blood in the water, but you only saw one mangled corpse and one other man lose his head. It wasn't very scary. The jump scares weren't...jumpy. It was a boring movie.I'm not going to go into detail with how bad the acting was, but it wasn't plain stupid, as one would expect. But it was far from good. I mean, at the very beginning, when the giant tank of the truck crashes into the swamp. releasing the shark, the sheriff drops a terrible one-liner. After the driver leaves, paying no attention to the deaths of the other two men, the sheriff dramatically takes off his glasses, and, looking into the distance, says, "What a lousy way to start the summer." Speaking of these men's deaths, the bodies disappear in the shots immediately after the kills.There were several deaths. None were very bloody, except for the one when the shark chopped off a cop's head that was watching a girl strip with his binoculars. Pervert. He had it coming. The deaths of the boyfriend and girlfriend in the boat were not spectacular. Swim away, scream, and disappear underwater. Not a lot of blood. The girl's mutilated torso is discovered later, however. There were at least four other deaths, but none were shown. Only one had blood float to the surface of the water.It qualified more as a PG-13 movie than a horror, except for the one scene with the girl's shredded torso, which probably gave it the R rating.I'm not asking for more violence and blood. I'm saying it shouldn't really qualify for a horror. It's more of a thriller.As a whole, it was pretty boring. I was waiting for the gore to spice things up, and it never came.And they went ahead with killing off the black guys, because every horror does that.
Michael O'Keefe It's about time for a mysterious creature to raise havoc in the swamps of Louisiana. Crowds are gathering in the Atchafalaya Basin to take part in Gator Fest. A black market exotic animal deal goes awry when a very large unusually muscular shark leaps into the murky swamp. Now how does a shark navigate in shallow, boggy swamps...mean and menacing. When a headless body is found in the swamp it is blamed on runaway gators displayed at the Gator Shack, a family owned drinkin' and eatin' waterin' hole. Owner Rachel Broussard(Kristy Swanson)is not about to let her business get a bad reputation; she more or less rounds up a posse of family and friends to find the shark she was sure of witnessing. A stranger named Charlie(D.B. Sweeney)happens to join in the search for the shark causing so much terror, panic and hysterics. And yes, Charlie is not there just by accident. The exotic shark takes very little time in running up a body count; and seems to bite off heads with the skills of a surgeon. SyFy channel, you gave us an entertaining creature feature. The CGI blends well. Why is it always fun to watch people get chomped and mangled? And a few young bouncing beauties don't hurt a thing. Also in the cast: Christopher Berry, Lauren Graham, Marcus Lyle Brown, Robert Davi, Jason Rogel and former Major League Baseball player, Wade Boggs.
el7 Swamp Shark is a SyFy Original Picture, and in spite of not being particularly shocking or scary, it's still highly watchable. The plot concerns a dastardly sheriff who releases a man-eating shark into the bayou, and the subsequent attempts of a brave local family to remove the thing before it eats too many of their establishment's customers. Robert Davi plays the heavy with gleeful malevolence, Kristy Swanson is back in heroic form as the head of the family, and D.B. Sweeney lends his affable charm to a mysterious role that becomes quite clear the first time you see him using a zoom lens.The shark is actually rather effective through most of the first two thirds of the movie. The filmmakers take a cue from Jaws and don't show too much of it, mostly a fin slicing through the water and the occasional dappled view of it (rendered in CGI of course) gliding through shadows underwater. It works, right up until the end when it finally launches itself out of the murk and into clear view, at which point it's as realistic looking as any SyFy Original Pictures CGI monster, which is to say: not in the slightest.But most people who tune in for these flicks aren't there for the thrills and chills anyway. We're there to watch familiar actors chew up the scenery in a goofy monster movie, and on that score, Swamp Shark completely delivers.
anythinghorrorscott The middle part of 2011 is proving to be a good period for the SyFy channel and their originals. Earlier this year SyFy's 51 (see review here) and BEHEMOTH (see review here) were promising, but both failed in their respective executions. BEHEMOTH promised a huge, planet-destroying creature but simply gave us a lazy, Lovecraftian-influenced beast who was attached to a mountain. But then last weeks ICE ROAD TERROR really surprised me with how fast-paced, gory, and fun it was (see review here), and now SWAMP SHARK, premiering on Saturday, June 25th at 9pm (ET/PT), once again proves that when the boys and girls over at SyFy really wanna make an entertaining flick, they can do it.SWAMP SHARK stars the original BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, Kristy Swanson as Rachel Broussard, the owner of the Gator Shack restaurant located right next to the swamplands of the Atchafalaya Basin. She runs the restaurant with her younger sister Krystal (Sophie Sinise, Gary Sinise's daughter) and her older brother Jason "Swamp Thing" (Jeff Chase). Everything's going really well as the town prepares for their yearly big event, Gator Fest, until crooked sheriff Watson (Robert Davi), who sells illegal exotic animals (??!!!?) accidentally releases a shark into the swamps. Yeah I know; it's a silly and completely absurd set up, but it actually fits the entire campy world created in SWAMP SHARK. Swanson is one of the first people to spot the shark and instead of balling up into a panicking, hysterical woman, she grabs her hunting rifle, a boat, and anyone else who believes her and goes out to hunt down the swamp shark. I loved Swanson's character and since her best known film is the original BUFFY, it would've been hard seeing her as anything other than a butt kicking hottie.And what self-respecting SyFy Original would forget to include some kind of 1980's pop culture reference? Not too worry; SWAMP SHARK has Baseball Hall of Famer Wade Boggs as a red neck deputy. I would've like to have seen him in a bigger role, but his role is pretty fun.One of the people Swanson recruits to hunt the shark down is Charlie (D.B. Sweeney; where's he been?), a mysterious man hanging around the town. Their first hunting party doesn't, as you can imagine, go very well and they loose their boat and are forced to regroup. But in the meantime the town is preparing for Gator Fest and the shark has really gotten a taste for human flesh. Of course we get tons of nods to the granddaddy of shark films (and arguably all "giant creature" flicks), JAWS, but everything in SWAMP SHARK is done with such a fun spirit that you just sit back and go along for the ride. Davi's sheriff Watson is so sleazy that you can't help but smile every time he's on screen. The man knows there's a shark in the swamp (because he's the one that accidentally released it) but does nothing to try and fix the situation. He doesn't send out a hunting party and he doesn't prevent people from swimming in the swamp even after the dead bodies start piling up (in pieces). I loved Davi's character and it's nice to see he still "has it"!!And maybe I'm just getting completely desensitized to bad CGI, but I thought the shark looked pretty good!! SyFy actually exhibits some restraint and doesn't show off the beast at every opportunity. We see flashes of it here and there and get teased way more than SyFy usually does. Of course there's the standard, "must have" scene of the shark jumping out the water to kill someone. This is the best look we get of the shark (until the final reel) and it was actually pretty cool looking. The body count could've been higher for my tastes, but the killings we do get were well-filmed. Director Griff Furst (who also directed last year's flaccid SyFy flick LAKE PLACID 3), takes his time here and sets up some pretty suspenseful kill scenes. And if you're like me you'll wonder why the two twenty-somethings, who wanted some privacy to have sex, took a canoe out into the swamp not 20 feet away from their friends. Sex in a canoe? Hey why not!!And just like in ICE ROAD TERROR, we get a little more blood than the usual SyFy Original. We get to see a lot of post-attack, ripped apart torsos and appendages, and we're privy to a lot of blood spraying all over various cast members. Yeah people, this one is pretty fun. Maybe it's because Summer's here? Maybe it's because I'm a sucker for a fun "beast attacks" flick? Or maybe it's just because the people over at SyFy are putting in some time and effort into their scripts!! But writers Charles Bolon, Jennifer Iwen, and Eric Miller give us a fun, light- hearted, and fast-paced script that despite the holes in logic keep you interested up to the end. And just wait until you see how they finally kill the shark!! I thought we were gonna get a very JAWS-like ending, but the writers took a hard left turn and gave us something original, fun, and very bloody. Nice job.A great cast who're obviously having a really fun time, a solid script with some originality in it, and some well-crafted death scenes make SWAMP SHARK a really entertaining and fun summer flick. SyFy has renewed my love of the "attacking beasties" summer flick and I can't wait to see what they have in store for us next!! Catch SWAMP SHARK this Saturday, June 25th at 9pm (ET/PT) on SyFy. Seriously!!