Just when you thought it was safe to come out from under the covers the sharks rise up yet again. After the huge success Sharknado was for the SyFy channel they have done it again with their next shark feature, Avalanche Sharks. As you can see they have not strayed far from the source material, exchanging tornadoes for avalanches. Below is the Avalanche Shark official synopsis.
Spring break in the mountains: snowboarding, beer, drunken co-eds in bikinis. As the yearly Bikini Ski Day party descends on a small mountain town, something lurks beneath the snow. When an unwitting rider causes an avalanche, it awakens a huge, menacing, prehistoric Snow Shark! With a newfound taste for human flesh, the Snow Shark picks off the snow bunnies mercilessly. Cut off from help by mountainous terrain and blinding snow, the local sheriff must make an unlikely alliance with a motley crew of snowboarders to take down the Snow Shark before the white hills run red with blood!
Now if you have all finished laughing at the notion of a “motley crew of snowboarders” then you may need to sit yourself down for the trailer.
Glad to see all the things this reviewer expects from a shark movie are in there. Stupid teens, bikinis, a shark that pops up in truly strange places (yeah I am talking about the hot tub scene) and people with guns shooting aimlessly at stuff. They even find time to add the crazy man who used to pop up in all the 80s Slasher movies (especially Friday the 13th 1 and 2). What made Sharknado so much fun was the nudge and a wink approach and a generally funny concept of having sharks leap out of a tornado. However, with this film it fits directly into pretty much every other shark related movie’s pattern (Sand Shark, Shark in Venice, etc), it has a shark popping up and eating people. There is also is the small problem that a shark in snow is already a concept that has appeared in film in the 2011 movie Snow Shark.
Not that any of this is a bad thing (horror is well known for returning to the same themes and shark fans know what these films are like), it’s just going to get cluttered up with the rest of the shark movies which pretty much all cover this kind of thing. It looks fun, but I am surprised that some kind of Sharknado team up (giant octopus would have been welcome) was not introduced, seems like a waste especially after the huge success it found. It looks good enough, but from viewing the trailer it is not going to be up there with Shark Attack 3 and Sharknado. Maybe the shoes are just too big to fill. Still it is early days and I really, really hope I am wrong, as this reviewer loves this kind of cheesy nonsense. Not sure on a release date yet, but we will have our fingers crossed that Avalanche Sharks will rock the shark fans’ world.