{"id":48770,"date":"2025-07-21T21:00:37","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T01:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=48770"},"modified":"2025-07-23T01:39:38","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T05:39:38","slug":"shark-week-2020-bad-movie-monday-shark-week-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/21\/shark-week-2020-bad-movie-monday-shark-week-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Shark Season (2020) [Bad Movie Monday] [Shark Week 2025]"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Asylum. The mere mention of the infamous production company\u2019s name can send shivers down any serious film-watcher\u2019s spine. <\/span><\/p>\n

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The Asylum -shudder- is known by and large for their \u201cmockbusters.\u201d Think <\/span>Transmorphers\u00a0coming out five minutes after\u00a0Transformers, in order to\u2026 I don\u2019t know, take advantage of five or six nearsighted Grandmas getting easily misled on the VOD store while they\u2019re babysitting Junior. When they\u2019re not being the Temu to Hollywood\u2019s Walmart, The Asylum also produces a lot of\u2026 well, let\u2019s just call them\u00a0weird\u00a0monster movies, such as\u00a0Mega Shark Versus Mecha Shark\u00a0(Sadly not a legal drama),\u00a02-Headed Shark Attack,\u00a03-Headed Shark Attack,\u00a05-Headed Shark Attack\u00a0(What happened to 4?? Cowards!!), and, I expletive you not,\u00a0Shark Side of the Moon. There are frankly a\u00a0lot\u00a0of\u00a0weird\u00a0shark-movies under The Asylum\u2019s belt, and not\u00a0one\u00a0of them is called\u00a0Plain Old Normal Shark. So when I happened on 2020\u2019s\u00a0Shark Season, starring the late Michael Madsen, my morbid curiosity demanded that I find out what their deal was.<\/p>\n

Firstly, when I say that Shark Season stars Michael Madsen, I think I should clarify here: if you were expecting Reservoir Dogs\u2019 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\u2019s producer showed up at Michael Madsen\u2019s house with a small, badly-oiled wheelbarrow full of Washingtons and asked him if he would read their script, and Madsen said, \u201cOkay, I\u2019ve got ten minutes. You got a camera on you? \u2018Cause I ain\u2019t leavin\u2019 this yard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Madsen plays James, a former Search-and-Rescue pilot, whose daughter Sarah (played by Reservation Dogs\u2019 Paige McGarvin) is a photographer\u2019s model who is out photographer-modelling for the day with her former boyfriend Jason (Ape vs Mecha Ape\u2019s Jack Pearson) and his current romantic interest \/ makeup applicator, Meghan (Deadly Garage Sale\u2019s Juliana Destefano). It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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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 \u201cnewly-formed island\u201d 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 \u201cspecial\u201d-effects appearance of the shark, and not any special quality of the shark, because I\u2019m sure that Computer-Shark is another of The Asylum\u2019s shark movies, and if not, then I will accept a writer\u2019s credit for the now-forthcoming film, please and thank you).<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s Indianapolis speech in Jaws. In fact, there is so much talk about king tides in this movie, I\u2019m surprised and a little disappointed that the movie wasn\u2019t titled King Tide-Shark. We also discover in this soliloquy (Which is a soliloquy because I\u2019m sure Michael Madsen wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Ski-Doo, but Sarah yells at the audience and her friend who suggests it, reminding them that Ski-Doos don\u2019t work without lanyards, duh. Okay, rich girl that grew up with Ski-Doos, sorry we don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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Anyway, when the Search-and-Rescue copter finally arrives, because blah-blah cell tower triangulation and Michael Madsen told them \u201cI don\u2019t know, fly over that way or somethin\u2019,\u201d the pilot gets the best line of the movie, which I just have to spoil for you here: \u201cOh my God, those girls down there are being circled by a giant shark\u2026 hold on, let me get a picture.\u201d And then he pulls out his camera phone, takes a picture of it, and flies away. Cinematic gold, I\u2019m 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\u2019Keefe and Mesa Shark awaits, and if it doesn\u2019t, it should.<\/p>\n

So, we\u2019ve gotten to the end of this and discovered that, in fact, The Asylum can make a movie that\u2019s not just a Silly Putty copy of another movie, although this is pretty much the exact plot of every low-budget shark movie I\u2019ve 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\u2019t know\u2026 some kind of shark\u2026 season. Like two old guys in Maine in rocking chairs being like, \u201cWelp, it\u2019s about that time of year for the shark attacks again, I reckon,\u201d and the other guy being like, \u201cAyuh.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Asylum. The mere mention of the infamous production company\u2019s name can send shivers down any serious film-watcher\u2019s spine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[477,2964],"class_list":["post-48770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-horror","tag-shark-week"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48770"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48799,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48770\/revisions\/48799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}