Hammerhead

Intensity

Stupidity:Nudity Ratio

9:2

Budget

Medium

It is hard to say where to begin with this one. For starters, the hero is the head of the IT department. Yup. That's right. The IT guy. Turns out the guy can shoot a gun, throw a knife with deadly results, and is dating a biologist who has an office (yes, an actual office, not just a desk in the basement) in a high rise building whom he calls "baby" virtually every time he says anything to her. Now it is good to see one of our own cast as a hero for a change, but the phrase "still pumped from using the mouse" is awfully close to the truth for most of us computer geeks.

So anyway, our movie starts with a couple on a boat who have found a secluded island. Unfortunately their attempt to swim to the shore results in their gory deaths at the hands (and teeth) of a hammerhead shark. The credits roll and we end up in the office of Amelia Lockheart (Hunter Tylo), who will be hereafter referred to as Babe because if William Foresyth's Tom Reed can call her that for an entire movie, I can certainly do it for the duration of this review. Soon it is revealed that Preston King has sent a message to Babe's boss that he has made a major discovery that may save the company. We also find out that Babe used to be engaged to Preston's son who died of cancer. We also spend some time in Preston's lab which disappointingly has neither tubes of bubbling liquid nor Jacob's ladders. Oh well, at least he does have an assistant with what is probably a hunchback. As he was spouting some techno babble I noticed that he had some specimens in these large holding tanks, mostly female with what looked like pasties with electric leads going to them. My thoughts immediately turned to Flesh Gordan's power pasties, but no, these were meant to be strategically placed sensors of some sort.

Pretty soon the entire gang including some additional cannon fodder arrive on Preston's island which apparently has a gigantic waterfall, rivers wide enough for three powerboats to cruise in formation, and a heliport. They quickly notice that Preston employs more guards than scientists. Almost immediately the group is informed that they have been brought to the island to die. Preston did not take getting fired well. I think that if I had somehow managed to acquire enough wealth to buy myself an island, equip it with a lab protected by a small militia outfitted with helicopters, boats and guns, I could probably find something else to focus on besides revenge. While Preston may be a genius, he lacks the managerial skills to run a cadre of hired killers. Apparently his plan was to lock our heroes in a room, flood it with water so that his son, the titular Hammerhead, can snack on them. Sounds simple enough, lock them in a room, let in water and the shark. Instead what happens is the controls for flooding the place seem to be inside. After the guard starts the flooding, he flees the room losing his rifle in the process (this will be a common theme). So do our heroes simply turn off the water, no, of course not. They open the valve more so that the can get to the ladder that goes up to the fan that leads directly outside. Tom then swims down to retrieve the rifle and shots the fan out of the wall. Three or four shots and a four foot wide fan just blows out of the wall. Oddly enough when he turns the same rifle on the shark at point blank range he just nicks him. After escaping by turning six shirts into a 30 foot long rope, they decide that they need to get to high ground so that the satellite radio will work. So of course the very next scene we find them at the dock trying to sneak on to a boat. Our heroes spend the rest of the movie roaming around the island encountering any number of incredibly unlikely things.

Our heroes take note of but are unconcerned by the three-eyed pig being roasted for supper.

After being attacked by the shark, Bernie is helped through the woods by his friends. Yes, that is his barely-attached right foot dragging behind him.

This is not a night time shot. It is underwater. Our bad guys are trying to repair the power to an underwater fence and the electrical box is underwater. Gee, I wonder what the problem could be?

As I was watching this I heard a pop as the needle was pulled out and I thought the Foley guy was getting carried away. When I backed up to check, I realized that the pop sound was the syringe coming apart. Coombs was able to hide the problem and continued on with the scene.

Tom, the IT guy, eventually manages to kill about 20 or 30 guards, blow up three boats and two helicopters. Despite being in clear sight of numerous guards with machine guns on multiple occasions, he never gets shot. Seriously, where the hell did Preston get these guys? The Thug R Us outlet store in the cutout bin? These guys are really inept. It's an IT guy with a huge gut. Point the machine gun at him and pull the trigger until he starts bleeding. This does not happen, not even once. Despite the fact that Preston's flunkies shot literally thousands of rounds of ammunition, bazooka shells and three or four air-to-ground missiles, they never even hit anyone much less kill them.

Finally after the shark has killed all the good guys but Tom and Babe who have killed everyone else on the island and blown up dozens of things including the shark, the movie ends.

A word about the science. Preston has successfully taken two completely different concepts (stem cells and shark's apparent resistance to cancer) and combined them to somehow turn his son into a half-shark half-man and while this has cured his cancer, it does have some drawbacks. His island is littered with byproducts of his experiments including vines that wrap around people, Venus fly traps that eat mice, aloe plants that eat worms and really nasty poison ivy. Naturally he decides to create a new race of humans and is trying to get his son to breed with women. Unfortunately despite dousing the women with pheromones, junior has a tendency to just eat them. At one point Preston laments that despite the fact that he can combine two species to create new ones he can't make them procreate. Wait, what? Isn't procreate and create new ones about the same thing in this case? Preston just seems fixated on having a natural childbirth and does not even consider that this is impossible. Even animals of similar species rarely cross breed, and those that do have sterile offspring (horse+donkey=mule). Sharks and man are not even in the species, or genus, or family, or class. Perhaps if he made another creature like his son and then bred those two together.

At one point, Babe discovers that the hammerhead cannot process nitrogen effectively by looking at the bloodwork(she compares it to getting the bends from deep sea diving). She theorizes that exposing the hammerhead to nitrogen might slow it down or make it explode. Yup, explode. So when Tom happens to find some liquid fertilizer in the greenhouse, he brings it along to spray on the hammerhead who obligingly blows up. (Nitrogen is usually N2 while fertilizer contains nitrate (NO3) which when combined with kerosene and blasting caps is explosive.) Just to clarify, Babe looks at the blood work of a completely new species and interprets the high nitrogen levels as not only being unusual but potentially explosive. I can see it now:

Patient: Doc, I feel kind of bloated.

Doctor: Well, let's just check your blood work. Woah, you nitrogen is way too high!

Patient: Is that bad?

Doctor: Nothing the bomb squad can't handle.

I can not detail all the stupid things in this movie. Honestly, it just goes from moronic pronouncement to ludicrous situation without blinking an eye. Don't think that the examples I have provided here is an exhaustive list. You don't have time to make fun of the first idiotic event before two others have happened. This may be one of the best examples of IITS that I have ever seen. Clearly what the characters do is not built on what has happened to date, but on some stray thought the screen writer (or producer) had.

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