The Asylum. The mere mention of the infamous production company’s name can send shivers down any serious film-watcher’s spine.
The Asylum -shudder- is known by and large for their “mockbusters.” Think Transmorphers coming out five minutes after Transformers, in order to… I don’t know, take advantage of five or six nearsighted Grandmas getting easily misled on the VOD store while they’re babysitting Junior. When they’re not being the Temu to Hollywood’s Walmart, The Asylum also produces a lot of… well, let’s just call them weird monster movies, such as Mega Shark Versus Mecha Shark (Sadly not a legal drama), 2-Headed Shark Attack, 3-Headed Shark Attack, 5-Headed Shark Attack (What happened to 4?? Cowards!!), and, I expletive you not, Shark Side of the Moon. There are frankly a lot of weird shark-movies under The Asylum’s belt, and not one of them is called Plain Old Normal Shark. So when I happened on 2020’s Shark Season, starring the late Michael Madsen, my morbid curiosity demanded that I find out what their deal was.
Firstly, when I say that Shark Season stars Michael Madsen, I think I should clarify here: if you were expecting Reservoir Dogs’ Michael Madsen coming after a shark with a straight razor while Stuck in the Middle With You played in the background, you were sadly expecting a little too much. In fact, Madsen is little more than a background player in this movie. One expects that the film’s producer showed up at Michael Madsen’s house with a small, badly-oiled wheelbarrow full of Washingtons and asked him if he would read their script, and Madsen said, “Okay, I’ve got ten minutes. You got a camera on you? ‘Cause I ain’t leavin’ this yard.”
Madsen plays James, a former Search-and-Rescue pilot, whose daughter Sarah (played by Reservation Dogs’ Paige McGarvin) is a photographer’s model who is out photographer-modelling for the day with her former boyfriend Jason (Ape vs Mecha Ape’s Jack Pearson) and his current romantic interest / makeup applicator, Meghan (Deadly Garage Sale’s Juliana Destefano). It’s important that we know that James is a former Search-and-Rescue person, because this foreshadows his later being on the phone with a current Search-and-Rescue person.
Sarah, whose mother died of cancer, which we need to know because this allows the movie to pass the Bechdel Test later, goes off with her not-my-man and his not-yet-my-woman to a “newly-formed island” for a shoot, which is important because it looks cool in overhead drone shots, and also so that they cannot be easily found by the Search-and-Rescue team later. They travel there by kayak, which is important because kayaks are easily tipped over, and The Asylum could not pay for tipping-over-an-actual-boat footage after spending their allotted $21.50 on a computer-shark (Please note here, I am describing the “special”-effects appearance of the shark, and not any special quality of the shark, because I’m sure that Computer-Shark is another of The Asylum’s shark movies, and if not, then I will accept a writer’s credit for the now-forthcoming film, please and thank you).
As happens in these films, one person dies and the tide starts to come in, and the girls (Oops, spoiler, I guess) have to re-kayak themselves and make for another island, because if not, there wouldn’t be a rest of the movie, but not before Sarah calls her Dad, so that he can call Search-and-Rescue, and have something to do for the rest of the movie, aside from looking shocked and concerned, although that may have just been due to Michael Madsen’s complete lack of eyebrows. This also allows Michael Madsen to sit and listen to the Search-and-Rescue guy read the entire Wikipedia entry about king tides aloud, for a stretch longer than Quint’s Indianapolis speech in Jaws. In fact, there is so much talk about king tides in this movie, I’m surprised and a little disappointed that the movie wasn’t titled King Tide-Shark. We also discover in this soliloquy (Which is a soliloquy because I’m sure Michael Madsen wasn’t listening to the guy any more than the audience, at this point) that the shark is extra-hungry now because it ate too many dead whales, or something.
After an exciting (?) encounter with some computer-dolphins (Also coming soon fromThe Asylum), the girls have a brief run-in with a guy on a Ski-Doo, in order for there to be at least one more kill in the movie, not counting the unconnected girl with the butt tattoo (The mockbuster title for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, maybe) that got chomped on at the beginning of the movie. Smart play would have been to then steal the dead guy’s Ski-Doo, but Sarah yells at the audience and her friend who suggests it, reminding them that Ski-Doos don’t work without lanyards, duh. Okay, rich girl that grew up with Ski-Doos, sorry we don’t know as much about Ski-Doos as you do. GEEZ. PS, the preceding paragraph was not paid for by the good folks at the Ski-Doo corporation. Ski-Doo.
Anyway, when the Search-and-Rescue copter finally arrives, because blah-blah cell tower triangulation and Michael Madsen told them “I don’t know, fly over that way or somethin’,” the pilot gets the best line of the movie, which I just have to spoil for you here: “Oh my God, those girls down there are being circled by a giant shark… hold on, let me get a picture.” And then he pulls out his camera phone, takes a picture of it, and flies away. Cinematic gold, I’m telling you. The girls get away (Oh, sorry, you were actually going to watch this?) and vow to move to New Mexico, where the promise of becoming the next Georgia O’Keefe and Mesa Shark awaits, and if it doesn’t, it should.
So, we’ve gotten to the end of this and discovered that, in fact, The Asylum can make a movie that’s not just a Silly Putty copy of another movie, although this is pretty much the exact plot of every low-budget shark movie I’ve seen over the past 25 years. Honestly, I was expecting Shark Season to have the shark carrying salt and pepper shakers, because yes, this is exactly the kind of Dad-joke that The Asylum would turn into the basis of an entire movie- or at least have something to do with, I don’t know… some kind of shark… season. Like two old guys in Maine in rocking chairs being like, “Welp, it’s about that time of year for the shark attacks again, I reckon,” and the other guy being like, “Ayuh.” But there were, frankly, no surprises waiting for me in Shark Season. Which, for a movie from The Asylum, is perhaps the biggest surprise of them all.
2 out of 5 unseasoned shark sandwiches. One for that one single line, and one to pour out on the curb for Michael Madsen. May he rest in peace, looking down on us all in apparent surprise.