‘Sky Sharks’ Review: Dir. Marc Fehse [FrightFest 2020]

Ready for an insane pitch for a movie? Yes? Then let me tell you about a little film called Sky Sharks… A team of geologists discover a Nazi warship buried in the Arctic. Said ship is full to the brim with rocket-powered sharks and their genetically mutated undead Nazi super-soldier riders. Worse still, although frozen in stasis for the last seventy-five years, the discovery of the ship also triggers the cargo to defrost. The reanimated corpses opt to continue where they left off and it’s down to Dr. Klaus Richter, the spiritual forefather of the experiment, and his daughters, to put a stop to the undead threat once and for all. The film has been in development for many years, and part of it was even filmed at FrightFest a few years back (during the Vue Leicester Square years). Now it’s ready to be unleashed and has the honour of kicking off this year’s digital edition of Arrow Video FrightFest. But has it been worth the wait?

Sky Sharks also has a massive pacing problem from the outset. It opens on a passenger plane, and within seconds it’s clear that the people aboard will be the first victims of the flying shark-riding zombie Nazi’s. However, rather than jump to the point, we spend far too much time getting to meet characters whom are pure cannon-fodder. They range from a tattoo-clad priest, to a father and daughter – the former of whom is happily watching a film filled with naked women next to her – and a drunk Texan played Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa.

Once the film gets going, the pacing suffers even further from a lot of stop-starting as it get bogged down in flashback scene after flashback scene. These sequences form the exposition-heavy portions of the film; they get repetitive and dull. One of them takes a good fifteen minutes to explain that the enemy are zombie Nazi’s riding flying sharks, something that we the audience and the characters being told the tale, are already aware of. The film appears to feel the need to explain the background to events in minute detail through these flashbacks, but in doing so, it just confuses the viewer. By the time we get back to the present day, we’ve completely forgotten what is happening. There are so many of these flashbacks stuffed into the film that, at times, it feels like you are watching a You Tube webisode series.

Sky Sharks also treats its female characters terribly. They’re all either used for their bodies, or spend the film doing exactly what the men tell them to. There’s no progression in their treatment; the result feels dated and, a lot of the time, super icky. In fact, the opening third of Sky Sharks is so bogged down with unnecessary nudity (all female) that at times you question whether you’re actually watching a soft-core porn mash-up of Sharknado and Dead Snow. The multitude of bare breasts and more is excessive, adding nothing to the plot. Most of the naked females aren’t even given a word of dialogue, their purpose appears to simply be to excite and titillate, which if the viewing audience were to merely be overly hormonal teenage boys, might work.

Visually, the majority of Sky Sharks feels somewhere between a computer game and music video i.e it’s super stylised and over-produced. The flashbacks are all told in slightly different styles, including at least one cartoon animation, and very closely resemble the mission and dream sequences within Sucker Punch. There’s a heavy amount of green screen and computer effects used throughout making it painfully obvious that everything on screen is artificial, but it does achieve some semblance of a stylistic aesthetic.

Considering the insanity of the plot, cheesiness of the dialogue, and questionable acting prowess on display, for Sky Sharks to truly succeed it needs to be watched with plenty of drinks and a large united cinema crowd. This is the kind of film that typically plays best to a rowdy crowd, but with it opening FrightFest’s digital edition where the audience members are scattered across the UK, it’s unclear if it’ll get the same reaction. If you’re watching in a social bubble, or as part of a watch party, you might be able to replicate some of that same FrightFest main-screen audience atmosphere, but if it’s just you sat alone, the insanity may overwhelm. Should you really like the film, don’t switch off when the credits start as there are a ton of mid and post credits sequences. These sequences potentially set-up the direction that director Marc Fehse is hoping to go in next.

Sky Sharks is a film that falls into the ‘car crash’ category. As much as you want to, you simply cannot pull yourself away from what is unfolding onscreen. Not quite a ‘so bad it’s good’ film, Sky Sharks will nonetheless entertain, even if that entertainment comes in the form of you screaming at the screen.