Spring Break Shark Attack: A Jabootu Readers’ Forum

We meet Nice Girl talking on the phone with Wild Friends, and establish a number of plot details; the overbearing father who doesn’t want NG to go to spring break, the fact that one of the Wild Friends’ boyfriend might be cheating on her, etc.

Overbearing Dad shoots down the Spring Break idea: “Those guys-they’re sharks.” Ah-hyuck hyuck hyuck.

One of about three millions plot threads that go nowhere is that OD has acknowledged having had an affair sometime in the past. This is used mainly to undercut his parental authority on the Spring Break issue. That’s for the kids. For the adults, NG goes and terrible things nearly happen to her, meaning that OD’s misgivings were justified. It’s plotting for everyone! That’s why anyone trying to get a ‘message’ out of the film is barking up the wrong tree. This film is way too generic to have any sort of authentic point of view.

Establishing spring break: Bikinis, butts, boobs, repeat.

Featured newspaper headline: DESPERATE SEARCH FOR HOUSEWIVES CONTINUES. Sigh. They just couldn’t let it go.

Nice Girl surprises her friends, who naturally have the sort of lavish beach house only TV characters ever end up with.

Being kind of a puritan at heart, the debauchery on display, even cleaned up for TV, kind of has me rooting for sharks. Put me on the side of Overbearing Dad. I can’t believe parents let their kids go to these things. Haven’t they seen those Girls Gone Wild video commercials?

Speaking of, Charming Jerk is filming passerby girls for just such a video, and his partner is improbably Wild Girl’s Secretly Cheating Boyfriend. It seems unlikely that those exact two guys would have teamed up, but hey, it sure making the scripting neater. Their video, however, doesn’t feature girls flashing their goods, but just showing an extra inch or two of skin for the camera. It’s more sort of a Girls Gone Imprudent sort of deal.

Actually, this is funnier than I’m indicating. The guys get girls wearing T-shirts or skirts to lift them to reveal their tiny swimsuits. However, plenty of girls wearing only teeny swimsuits are all over the place. Lame.

Good Girl’s ‘Virgin’ credentials are trotted out. That’s for the parents. However, Wilder Friend points out that all the boys back home are boring, and that this is a good place to alleviate herself of that burden. That’s for the kids.

Sensitive Lad’s Mom (hereafter Mom) runs a lower class, blue collar boat rental place, and Sensitive Lad works there. They’re locals, because townies are always purer of heart than tourist-types. (Except, of course, for Good Girl.) Oh, and Byron Brown is in the movie, first seen having rented a boat from Mom. We don’t know what his role is, but he’s the only ‘name’ for the older viewers. The younger ones have O.C. Girl.

They mention an artificial reef recently built here. Although such things have in the real world been constructed with no ill effect, a movie can’t allow man to muck around with Nature with no consequences. (Plus, the damn thing promotes tourism and capitalism, so it’s a double-yuck situation.) Therefore the reef will be partly responsible for the shark business.

When we meet Sensitive Lad, he’s all TV show broody yet manly about the fact that the family business might not be able to send him to college. Needless to say, we instantly peg him to be Nice Girl’s Designated Boyfriend To Be.

Nice Girl’s Brother (hereafter Brother) is out in a boat with his professor. He spouts some horrendously generic stuff about the environment, and naturally is the only one thinking there might be a shark problem in the offing. Again, having people come out and say things like “You can’t just pluck something manmade down, screw with Mother Nature, and not have eco-systemic consequences!” without it being a bit on the nose. By the way, Man has been screwing around with Mother Nature for quite a while, and only in movies has it resulted in mass shark attacks and artificially induced ice ages and suchlike. Luckily, people finally seem to be noticing the boy-who-cries-wolf quality of such pronouncements.

As an IRONIC COUNTERPOINT during the scene, some bigass sharks are seen swimming unnoticed through the glassy waters around and under their small craft. Although I prefer physical props for my monster movies, the CGI presumably used here shows how far things have come. The sharks look great, despite the distortion effect used to suggest them being underwater.

Nice Girl comes across Sensitive Lad, there’s an instant attraction, etc.

Wild Girl comes across her errant boyfriend, who pretends to be happy she’s there, but confides to Charming Jerk his fears that she will crimp his skirt-chasing. Gee, I wonder what will happen to that guy.

Meanwhile, Charming Jerk instantly casts his possessive eye on Nice Girl. Will she fall for his snake oil routine, rather than seeing that Sensitive Lad is the boy for her? Man, what an innovative script this is.

Lest we have somehow failed to identify Charming Jerk as a Jerk-which would require a uniquely unobservant viewer-he makes some boorish remarks about his plans for Nice Girl. Boo!

Dance club scene, blah blah. Charming Jerk goes after NG, who continues to go after (more subtly, and with intentions of a more romantic nature, of course) Sensitive Lad, blah blah. Again, it’s like a Very Special Spring Break episode of One Tree Hill. It doesn’t make me much of a reviewer, but frankly I ended up fast forwarding through a wad of this. We could really use some more shark stuff.

Of course, Nice Girl and Sensitive Lad are so obviously right for each other that the film has to artificially keep them apart for awhile. And so, right on cue after their romantic slow dance together, the Wild Girls come and drag NG off, protesting that they haven’t seen her much. This isn’t true, actually, and anyway both have throughout noisily made it their mission to get NG hooked up with somebody, so their coming over and tearing her away from a boy she’s obviously interested in doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, other than from a script standpoint.

Meanwhile, Deadmeat Cheating Boyfriend has lured some girl out in the water. We break away from them, but I think I can guess where this is going..

Nice Girl breaks away and finds Sensitive Lad in a book store. See, he’s all smart and serious and stuff. Yes, yes, I think we get that he’s a better match for her than Charming Jerk.

As they Reveal Their Very Souls to one another, we learn that Overbearing Dad inevitably has Nice Girl’s future all mapped out, and that this includes her becoming a lawyer. Ah, the law profession, the shorthand for all that is soul crushing. Meanwhile, Nice Girl in her secret dreams wants to be an anthropologist, so that she can study “different cultures, different people…” Yes, yes, that’s most thoroughly groovy.

Back to Deadmeat Cheating Boyfriend and Sacrificial Chippie. She does the “I’m scared, there’s something touching my leg” bit, and then goes under, because DCB has to pay by being the guy who sees what awaits him. When he goes under-they really could have used a good ‘shark head rearing up from the water’ shot here-we get our first Explosive Jetting Fountain of Blood and Water. Apparently the human body has a much higher pressure circulatory system than I had thought.

Nice Girl visits Brother and they establish his experimental anti-shark device. Hmm, I wonder if that will come into play later. He also warns her about his belief that the reef may attract killer sharks, etc., blah blah.

This is followed by another Beach & Bikini scene, setting up the inevitable ‘Nice Girl Sees a Girl Floundering in the Water, Wonders if It’s a Shark Attack, but Ho Ho It’s A False Alarm.’ Yep, as stolen straight from Jaws.

There’s a lot more of the same, some filling in of details but mostly just reiteration of stuff already pretty much established. You know, you can actually use generic templates and characters like this to good effect, but the idea is to use quick strokes. You assume the audience recognizes the canned motivations and character traits for each person and just move on. Unfortunately, way too many hack scriptwriters like to pretend that the cardboard characters they employ have depth. Well, they generally don’t. Here, certainly, everyone remains firmly embedded within their type, so there’s little reason to spend so much time with them. We can only assume that the film’s budget only allowed for so much shark action. Still, this treading water, literally and figuratively, wears thin after a while.

Bryon Brown pops back up to hire a boat again, and his motivations are kept mysterious, so we immediately suspect he’s up to no good. I suppose it’s possible that some would wonder if he’ll turn out to have romantic intentions towards Sensitive Lad’s Mom, but if that works, it’s only because the film’s shallowness works to keep you from thinking about things too much. I mean, the sheer fact that each time we’ve seen him, he’s had money in his hand-FILTHY FILTHY MONEY-suggests that he’s up to something.

In a bad ‘comic’ scene, one of the Wild Girls proves to have invited a few kids over, and the beach house is soon besieged by an army of partygoers. Ho ho.

Less Wild Friend, the one with the Jerk Boyfriend, finds direct evidence of his having cheated on her. Since he’s already reaped his just deserts, this smacks a bit of closing the barn door after the horse is gone. Perhaps she’ll end up being attracted to Nice Girl’s Brother, whose Nerd credentials will play off well against Jerk Boyfriend’s philandering surfboy ways. I mean, in this sort of picture, that’s just how you’d expect things to work.

More of the same, more of the same.

Charming Jerk is becoming increasing less Charming and more Jerkish as Nice Girl eludes his clutches. In a poorly blocked scene, Charming Jerk spikes the soda she asked for (yep, a soda, that’s how nice she is) with a date rape pill. Well, that’s a charming direction for the film to go in.

By the way, has anyone ever been at a food stand and ordered “two sodas”? Hey, how about getting two ‘foodstuffs and sides’ to go with that? Two 7-Ups or Sprites or something are duly handed over, though.

It’s a slow acting drug, I guess, and it’s that night that it really starts kicking in. Just when his evil plans are coming to fruition, they provide Charming Jerk a rather lame reason to leave her alone for a minute, and she stumbles out onto the beach. Providentially, Sensitive Lad shows up and foils Charming Jerk’s scheme by calling for Nice Girl’s friends and taking the bamboozled gal upstairs for a lie-down. (In one of the film’s less credible moments, the unguarded bedroom proves to have no one in it, if you know what I mean, despite the drunken Spring Break party that’s been occurring at the house all day.)

Despite the fact that Nice Girl is entirely level-headed and been sticking to soda, her friends don’t find it all that weird that she’s totally blotto. You’d think they’d at least be savvy enough to suspect that she’s been drugged, given that that sort of thing is hardly unknown to happen.

Proving a pretty naÔve bunch, everyone eventually leaves Nice Girl alone in her stupor. This allows two things to occur. First, she phones Overbearing Dad in her fog, who isn’t too pleased when he figures out that she’s defied him and gone to Spring Break. Second, Charming Jerk shows up for an extraordinarily uncomfortable bit where he nuzzles her and fondles her and makes us wonder how far the film will let him go. Luckily, Sensitive Lad’s approach breaks things up (although not before we feel like we’ve been coated with slime), and finally suspicious, the latter hangs out to watch over her after Charming Jerk leaves.

Meanwhile, we get another Incidental Shark Attack, with a girl dangling her feet off a pier before being pulled into the water. This is where we get one of our unfortunately rare shark-rearing-from-the-water shots.

Bryan Brown pops up, acting suspicious on the boat he rented from Sensitive Lad’s Mom.

Nice Girl wakes, sans headache, and the girls finally consider whether she might have been drugged.

Charming Jerk comes by to rent a boat from Sensitive Lad’s establishment. Sensitive Lad tries to nix the idea, but his Mom notes that they just had a rental cancellation-gee, that’s convenient. Imagine coming across an unreserved charter boat in the very midst of Spring Break.

By the way, I don’t dispute that louts like Charming Jerk exist, in fact, way too many of them do. Still, wouldn’t he have to be a complete moron, no matter how much of a megalomaniac he is, to keep after Nice Girl after his drug scheme went so publicly awry?

Charming Lad somehow convinces Nice Girl and Wild Friends to spend the night out on the boat. (With, naturally, Sensitive Lad along to handle the driving.) Considering that they all have to at least suspect the possibility that he drugged her last night, I found this pretty unlikely. But anyway.

At the pier, Overbearing Dad shows and his attempts to order Nice Girl to leave ensures that she goes on the excursion. Frankly, that idea would have worked better if he had shown up at the house and motivated her before she was standing right in front of the boat, but anyway.

With the film now roughly at the halfway mark, the sharks can finally start coming more into things. Charming Jerk, NG and WF go in the water. Sensitive Lad, staying on board as he’s working, suddenly notices a huge cloud of blood spreading through the water. As this is sort of weird, he tells everyone to get in the boat, but is ignored (despite the fact that they are swimming amidst a big mass of the stuff!). Then some shark fins make the scene. Sadly, Nice Girl has, in water monster fashion, somehow quickly gotten a good distance from the boat.

Aping an idea from Jurassic Park, Sensitive Lad yells for her to be absolutely still as the fins glide directly past her, like a foot or two away, since sharks are attracted to movement. So they are, but the water is full of blood, and they’d be pretty frenzied right now, I think, and attacking pretty much anything. Also, not to be crude, but wouldn’t you’d have to think she’s pissing in the water right now? Wouldn’t that attract their attention?

Meanwhile, Charming Jerk keeps yelling for her to swim for the boat, despite the fact that she’s a good distance away and the sharks are right on her. See, bad guys must always be dumb, too.

Since she doesn’t flail around, the sharks begin leaving the area. (Again, with all that mystery blood in the water. Right.) For no reason other than to have something exciting happen, Sensitive Lad calls for her to swim to the boat while the sharks are still pretty close by, allowing for an ‘exciting’ chase. Yeah, I sure was worried that the film’s heroine would be eaten. This actually would have been more suspenseful if they had so stranded one of the Wild Friends, since we might actually have believed they might get whacked.

The sharks start ramming the cabin cruiser. (So much for them not attacking things that aren’t moving.) This naturally is to allow for the boat to be damaged, for ‘suspense’ purposes. Because this is a movie, the radio magically doesn’t work (!!), while even a Luddite like me-I have a rotary phone at home-laughs over the idea that five college kids went out without anyone bringing a cell phone.

Would two sharks really keep battering a boat with their snouts for minutes on end? It seems unlikely.

With the boat nearly crippled, and following the inevitable ‘the engine won’t work; quick, fix it before we die!’ sequence, the craft starts limping off with the sharks in pursuit. They can’t make it back to the mainland, but safely reach a small islet.

Meanwhile, Nice Girl’s Brother is pulling huge but dismembered sea turtle corpses up from the water. It seems a bit late to be trying to establish the presence of sharks, but anyway.

In a bit that proves that the scriptwriter has no idea how academia works, Brother’s professor advises him not to pursue his shark theories with the authorities. (I mean, c’mon, wouldn’t you at least alert the Coast Guard and let them draw their own conclusions?) He maintains that if Brother makes a stink and then proves wrong, it will destroy him professionally. That’s hilarious. Being right isn’t the important thing, taking the politically correct position is. Railing against the supposed environmental effects of an artificial reef, no matter how meager the evidence is, would more likely put him well on the road to tenure than ruin him. Hey, complete and utter frauds like Paul Ehrlich have remained academia superstars for decades despite making concrete apocalyptic predictions that have again and again and again proven laughably off the mark.

As the kids carry their gear onto the island, Nice Girl finds the blister pack of the date rape drug. (What, Charming Jerk was going to try to use it on a boat?!) This leads to what proves a thankfully short round of ‘Is it Charming Jerk or Sensitive Lad who drugged her?’ Luckily, the idea that Sensitive Lad would be have done it is so completely retarded that they don’t even bother trying to pretend that anyone would really believe it.

In the film’s most unbelievable scene, when Nice Girl finally gets around that night to accusing Charming Jerk of using the drugs, she eventually ends up just glaring at him in that ‘You’re such a jerk’ fashion and lets it go. Sensitive Lad punches him, but no one even mentions going to the cops. In the end, that’s because if they had Charming Jerk arrested when they got back to the mainland, he wouldn’t be in a position to be eaten by a shark. (Oops, sorry.) However, this aspect of the film is just unbelievable. None of these characters have any reason to protect Charming Jerk, and their shrugging off the fact that he is, at the very least, an attempted rapist, is just beyond belief.

Increasingly-Not-So-Wild-Friend naturally stumbles across the half eaten corpse of her errant boyfriend. What are the odds? Of all the inlets in all the world, you have to wash up on mine.

The boat fixed, the kids head back.

Back on the mainland, Overbearing Dad is showing signs that he, you know, actually cares for his daughter and stuff, so that they can have a heartwarming rapprochement later. And another check off the plotline list.

The kids get back and break up to alert the authorities and such. Hilariously, Nice Girl tells her now Wisened-Up Friends to tell the cops about Dead Boyfriend, but doesn’t mention, ‘oh, yeah, and how Charming Jerk tried to rape me.’ With everyone splitting up, Charming Jerk is able to sneak off. Does he immediately get out of town where his rich and presumably amoral family could surround him with high-priced legal talent? No, he hits the beach to look for some action. (!!) Man, I wonder what will happen to him next?

In case you’re wondering about that cloud of water that imperiled the kids before, back when they were on the boat, it’s because somebody was using the boat to chum the waters to attract the sharks. Sensitive Lad’s Mom immediately figures out that it must be Bryon Brown, probably by using the Murder, She Wrote rule: The biggest guest star is always the killer. This attempt to provide a human villain is pretty lame-although they seemingly always do that in these movies-and his motive is that the reef has taken tourists away from his business, which is on another beach, etc. Following how things have gone up to now, Sensitive Lad’s Mom confronts him and makes a big speech but never seems to consider going to the police or Coast Guard, although the guy is clearly guilty of at least Depraved Indifference.

Zillions of kids are partying on a floating platform in the harbor, and the water is swarming with a zillion more, when an entire flotilla of sharks appears a short distance off. This is a pretty cool shot and was heavily flogged in the pre-broadcast advertising. The sharks hit the harbor before much evacuating can be accomplished and start munching people. This is the big payoff scene, and it’s not bad. For about five minutes the movie is exactly what you were hoping for. Not as many get et as you’d think would probably happen, but there’s lot of blood and gory wounds in the aftermath and such.

Oh, and I don’t want to shock the hell out of you, but Charming Jerk ends up getting munched.

Meanwhile, Sensitive Lad, Nice Girl and Brother start loading the boat with chumming material, hoping to lure the sharks off. You’d think with tons of blood and body parts in the water and actual people in their mouths and dozens more kicking and screaming all over the place that this wouldn’t work. Still, it’s a movie, so it does.

Bryon Brown, who’s had maybe two or three minutes of screen time, tops, gets to survey the Folly of What He’s Wrought. He ends up being taken in by the cops, although given that the boat has been used and even filled with chum since he used it, there’s really no physical evidence to prove he’s done anything.

Once the sharks leave the beach, everything else is basically epilogue. The sharks trail and then attack the boat, disabling it. Brother’s anti-shark device is deployed, but it needs a connection fixed, and Nice Girl has to go into the water to do so. (In a nice bit a little earlier, a moment of panic concludes with Sensitive Lad getting a spear gun projectile through his shoulder, disabling him. By the way, if you ever find yourself in similar straits, don’t allow Nice Girl to tend to you. She removes the spear-probably not a good idea to start with-by pulling the barbed end back through the entrance wound, rather than pulling the smooth shaft out via the exit wound. Ouch!) Again, I really doubt many thought the movie would end with the Heroine getting gobbled up, and no, she doesn’t.

Blah blah. Brown goes with the cops, Nice Girl and Dad, who’s no longer overbearing, mend fences (although actually he has pretty good grounds for an “I told you so” speech), NG and Sensitive Lad look to have a wonderful future before them, etc. We also hear that the artificial reef will be torn down, because manmade things are bad even if they don’t actually cause any mischief.

•Hm, a shark movie starts with women out swimming. Originality will obviously be a byword in this movie. As in, they’ll go right by it.

•How’d those women end up out in the middle of the ocean, with no land in sight, in a rubber inflatable with no engines? That would be a lot of rowing for women out for some relaxation, not to mention a little dangerous as they’re apparently miles from shore. Hope they don’t spring a leak.

•Oh-oh, they’re drinking out of martini glasses. Just what everyone takes out on a picnic on the water.

•They’re clearly the idle rich (except for that “how’d they get out there except by rowing” bit). They are so dead.

•Hehe, you can see them deliberately tip over the boat in their “panic”. Can’t blame the shark for that, dudettes.

•Oh, we get a shot of gulls circling for the after-scraps. That’s original.

•Next scene, two girls on their way to Florida talk on a cell phone to a third. OK, this is clearly the heroine, and two pieces of shark-bait.

•The heroine is blowing off a chance to spend her break working for charity to chase boys with her friends in Florida. I think I’ll be cheering for the shark in this one.

•Ooh, witty foreshadowing, as Dad refers to boys as “sharks” and talks about not wanting to “throw his daughter into the deep end”. Irony!

•Oh, classy move, hon, referring to your Dad’s affair in front of your mom to score a cheap point. Go, sharks!

•The scene shifts to Florida. “Seagull Beach”? More originality.

•Reference to a “new reef” that’s been built. That might just be a plot point.

•Do they have armed guards that keep the unattractive students off the beach?

•Innuendo about heroine coming to Florida to lose her virginity. Here, sharkey, sharkey, sharkey, I need you now…

•Whoa! Decent adult actors! The sad part is that they’re probably making less than the bodies beautiful.

•Australian guy (Bryan Brown!) apparently has money problems due to the new reef built for Seagull Beach attracting tourists away from his spot.

•He’s complaining to an older woman, henceforth known as Mom. She’s sympathetic towards Australian guy, and offers to lend him something to tide him over, since her boat rental company at the beach is doing well. Only your destined love interest will lend you money, Australian guy. (Note afterwards: Nope, he’s not playing an Australian Michael Caine role here. Give the movie credit for that.)

• Her son is clearly salt of the earth, since he’s not wearing a thong like the rich college kids.

•Anyone notice a strong class warfare undertone so far? I have a feeling this movie might have been subtitled “Eat the Rich”.

•Ooh, pretty underwater shots!

•An East Indian guy and a young “hunky in a nerdy way” dude are doing Science Stuff on a small boat. “The green sea turtle population has plummeted”, so something must be feeding off them. You mean, the rest of the world’s sea turtles are struggling to survive pollution, poaching, and habitat destruction, but YOUR turtles – nope, must be something eating them.

•OK, the shot of the shark swimming unseen around the research boat through transparent water is both realistic, and scary.

•Bet the young guy on the boat is (1) heroine’s brother; and (2) shark bait.

•Ah, so it’s mankind’s fault that the reef’s attracting sharks. Knew there had to be some eco-guilt involved.

•Heroine meets working-class hunky son (WCHS). Gotta get the romance started soon.

•Ooh, we learn their names, finally. Danielle and Shane. Like I care.

•We meet Girlfriend #1’s boyfriend, and his friend, Slimy Guy. GF#1’s BF is not too happy to see her.

•Lame pick-up lines, Slimy Guy.

•Oh, great, more “losing my virginity” innuendo. PLEEAASE, sharks!

•Girlfriend #1 is clearly insecure with her boyfriend.

•”What kind of fun can you have with your girlfriend around?” Dude, you’re dead meat, why worry?

• Sorry, slimy guy, WCHS has caught heroine’s eye on the dance floor.

•Aww. Heroine and WCHS get to slow dance. But Slimy Guy (SG) and girlfriends have to crash the scene.

•GF#1’s BF is out swimming with another girl. Hope he’s got “protection”. Heh, I’m so funny.

•More romancy stuff between Heroine and WCHS, in bookstore. Yes, let’s prove that the working class guy actually is smarter than the spring break student crowd.

•Actually, most spring break documentaries have already made that point.

•Girl, we don’t want to hear how your father’s wrecking your life by pushing you to be a lawyer. He can’t even control where you go on spring break.

•Yep, there goes the boyfriend and the girl he was fooling around with.

•Good grief, did the shark just depth-charge them or something? What’s with the underwater explosions?

•Yep, brother’s the nerdish scientist from the boat.

•He’s got a “shark pod” to protect whole beaches. But right now, they just electrocute people. Yep, that’s a design flaw.

•You know, the parents didn’t seem so bad. What’s all the angst about them?

•Brother tells Heroine to stay out of the water. Like that’ll do a lot of good.

•Back on the beach, Heroine freaks because someone plays the “grab the girl from under the water”. Oh, it’s Slimy Guy. Not wise to Cry Wolf, er, Shark, Slimy Guy.

•Slimy Guy is wearing a shark-tooth necklace. Irony, irony.

•WCS gets teased by mom over new girl. I notice the adults haven’t done anything yet. And what happened to Australian Guy? Oh, speak of the Devil….

•He’s offering to pay Mom for the use of her boat? To go out alone? Hey, I thought he was having money problems.

•Pre-party get-together gets out of control. Slimy Guy has good advice, too late – never invite anyone to your place.

•That’s an awfully neat out-of-control party.

•Heroine shows her “nice girl” cred by refusing to make part of a boy-girl-boy sandwich with Slimy Guy.

•GF#1 watches the videotape, and gets mad, although it’s not all that scandalous.

•WCS shows up, for a tÍte-‡-tÍte on the porch. They talk about the sociology of the party crowd, until Slimy Guy shows up and plays the Class Card with WCHS.

•Oh-oh, SG is spiking Heroine’s drink!

•Heroine is showing effect of the spiked drink. Or else a bad burrito earlier in the day.

•She’s a nice girl to the last. As she stumbles and spills someone’s drink, she mutters the location of the paper towels in the house.

•Fortunately, she breaks away from SG, and runs into – surprise! – WCHS, who carries her back to the house. He enlists the GFs to put her to bed. Take that, SG!

•GF wipes her friend’s head twice with a damp cloth and leaves to go back to the party. Gee, thanks, Florence Nightingale.

•Dazed Heroine calls parents and confesses. She mutters a bit, then hangs up, alarming her dad enough to announce he’s heading to Florida to get her.

•SG oozes up the stairs, as more shark-bait girls dangle their feet off the dock.

•Oh, dear, Heroine’s virtue is in danger, as SG slimes toward the bed.

•So is one of the shark-bait girls.

•Oh, smooth move shark, didn’t even spill her beer.

•By the way, that was NOT a convincing shark head.

•Oh, goody WCHS shows up in time to rescue Heroine, if not shark-bait.

•The morning after, Heroine is less worried about partial amnesia, and whether she might have been drugged and assaulted then that she CAN remember that she called her father.

•SG tries to rent a boat from WCHS, who refuses, but Mom helpfully accepts the deal.

•Oh, SG is making more “first time” innuendo with Heroine.

•Heeeere’s Dad! Must have been a direct flight.

•”Danielle, do not get on that boat!” “Just watch me.” Just listen to Dialogue-o-Matic churn.

•The girls are out on the boat, as GF1 complains about her boyfriend. She’s not really concerned he’s missing, still fussing about the videotape.

•SG decides to go swimming, and pulls Heroine in.

•Nope not a shark attack, it’s worse – a music video interlude.

•Hey, where’s the blood coming from? Oh, a character asks that as well.

•Oh, two sharks! Go for SG, guys! He’ll be tasty, I promise! And the GFs would be great appetizers!

•Slowest sharks in the world, as they laaazzzily chase Heroine.

•WCHS throws Heroine a life-ring, and tells her to stay still, since sharks are attracted to movement. SG of course screams at her to “SWIM! SWIIIIIMMMM!” Because bad guys are always idiots.

•Why not drive the boat towards her instead of having her swim towards it, if movement is such a bad idea?

•Hmm, Jaws showed an attack on a boat with something more than a shaking camera viewpoint.

•Things I learned™: The presence of a shark immediately causes radios to self-destruct.

•Yep, let’s head for that small island Ω mile away. Of course, we’re looking at a large island at least 5 miles away.

•You know, we never found out where the gusher of blood was coming from. I thought we’d see a slaughtered whale behind the boat. (Note: Actually, it’s explained later.)

•Dear Lord, how many turtles have been decapitated?

•Oh, “5, maybe 6”, as Brother dictates it into his recorder on board the Research Vessel Shark Bait. Apparently no one uses a notebook in science any more. Also, scientists cannot now count beyond 5 unaided. I remember my math teacher saying that would happen if we became too dependent on calculators.

•Heroine finds a package of roofies on the boat, and stares out to sea as we move to commercial break.

•Hey, it’s night! Hey, they’re now on the Island! A lot happened during the break, I see.

•Campfire! Anyone bring marshmallows? “Kumbaya, my Lord, kumbayaaaaahhh…”

•Heroine tells SG about finding the roofies. SG tries to suggest cleverly that WCHS drugged Heroine’s drink. Heroine doesn’t fall for it.

•LOGIC! As Heroine proves that SG is the culprit, not WCHS.

•Hey, it’s morning. And WCHS is thinking of nursing the boat home. Yeah, much smarter than waiting for the search party.

•I apologize to the movie. It explains the blood. It was chum, but WCHS doesn’t know why it was in the “chum well” of the boat, since he and Mom don’t approve of chumming, and never use it.

•Hey, it’s GF#1’s BF, washed up on the beach. Or a mannequin representing the remains.

•GF#1 is more queasy than heartbroken. Guess that video thing turned her off completely.

•BTW, where’s Australian Guy?

•? They made it home? So, Heroine jumps on a plane with Dad, and leaves? The movie’s over? No such luck. OK, I bet her brother’s out at sea right now, not knowing of the shark pack, needing rescue…

•Ahh. Australian Guy is a bad guy! He was chumming from the boat the night before. To bring in sharks, close the beaches and drive people to HIS beach. OK, I admit, hadn’t seen that one coming.

•What? The brother’s on shore. What the heck would take these people back onto the water? Is the rest of the movie just going to be a sensible closing of the beaches until the sharks are killed, driven away, or just migrate further?

•… blink… Here’s what – Brother says, “You’d better go report this to the Harbour Police – I’ll go and check it out.” They found BF’s body, fer cripe’s sake – no one’s thought to report that yet? And a graduate student is the only one to go “check it out”? Clearly, higher education is wasted on the rich.

•Dear merciful heavens, peope are still in the water despite a Tiger Shark death discovery the night before. Even SG, who just spent the last 24 hours terrorized by sharks. Oh, the authorities explain they don’t want to create “utter chaos” by closing the beaches. Hey, isn’t that the definition of Spring Break?

•Brother’s thesis advisor gives an alarmingly accurate summary of the costs of scientific rocking of the boat. However, they just saw a mutilated body, at least five women are missing, and their boat was half destroyed in a shark attack! That’s enough evidence to get the authorities to act, I’d say. [Editor Ken: Hmm, obviously I had a different take on the validity of the Professor’s advice. Perhaps academics in the hard sciences actually do care about cause and effect and getting things right. Of course, Brother could still just switch over to the Humanities Department and reap all the rewards of his environmental alarmism, even more so if they did indeed prove scientifically groundless.]

•Attack of the badly superinposed shark fins! No, this scene has nothing to do with the attack at the Amityville Beach, uh-uh, no way…. See? There are LOTS of sharks, not just one. Totally different.

•WCHS decides to “lure them out” away from the beach by chumming a trail away from them. Yeah, that’s easier than telling people to get out of the water.

•Yes, let’s take the little cutesie research boat to do that. Has no one ever heard the line “We’re going to need a bigger boat?”

•Oh, yeah, that worked MUCH better than shouting out “Hey, look out for the sharks”.

•This scene must have been written by the geeks who weren’t allowed on the beach with the good looking people. Sheer revenge fantasy.

•You know, I thought Florida had people watching the beaches. Sharks shouldn’t be able to sneak up on a beach like that.

•Guy parasails into a shark. Airline food.

•SG shows his unheroic colours, but ends up in water just the same. Yep, there he goes.

•Heroine – “This can’t be real”. Yeah, those are pretty badly done shark effects, I agree.

•You know, the water’s pretty full of blood already. How’s the chum going to get noticed?

•”Come and get it – Ya hungry? We got plenty of CHEESE for you!”

•The sharks are working as a team now?

•Yes, they’re trying to pull the boat under. It’s tradition, you know.

•I’m not sure how the sharks have come to figure out that the food is above the waterline on a boat.

•Maybe I’d stop revving the engines once they start to smoke, guys….

•Yeah, the grad student is useless. “I haven’t read this chapter.” Whoever wrote this thing definitely has an anti-university undercurrent going.

•Oh, now WCHS has been shot with a loose spear gun. What the??

•Bad shark effect.

•You know, I don’t think you’re supposed to pull objects out of puncture wounds like that. Promotes bleeding.

•So, brother tries out the anti-shark pods he’s been developing.

•Uh-oh. Pod 6 is down. Must be fixed … bm bm bm … in the water. Not sure why they can’t just pull it back on board for repairs.

•So, Heroine must go. “I’m the only one who can.” So, that’s the reason the Plot-o-matic shot WCHS. (Big Bro has to monitor the electronics.)

•Yeah, I’d curl my toes going into that water too.

•WCHS says he’ll pull her up if anything goes wrong. Dude, you’ve just had a through-and-through puncture wound in your shoulder, then had the pronged spear pulled back out. You should lie down and bleed to death, like any normal person.

•Whee! She did it! And there go the sharks. I think Brother better head for the patent office as soon as they get back to land.

•And, just too late, here comes the Cavalry – er, Coast Guard!

•Mom faces off against Australian Guy. “I just wanted to throw a scare into everybody”. “Well, you got what you wanted.”

•Aww, Heroine and Dad make up. He’s learned that she can look after herself against rapists. And packs of tiger sharks. Maybe he’ll allow her to leave home now. Or just lock her in the basement until she’s forty, if things like this are what happen when she’s on her own.

•Double Aww. Heroine and WCHS kiss.

•”Whaddya think? Next year, Cancun?” Hey, girl, he makes his LIVING off the tourist industry here. Have some respect. And what about Habitat for Humanity?