Griff Furst

(In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) In theory, a movie called Ghost Shark, with a premise as bonkers as a ghost shark, should be easy to bring to completion. Since the premise makes no sense, make it a comedy in which people get ripped apart by, well, a ghost shark and you’ve got a solid template. There are enough horror/comedy hybrids out there that taking inspiration shouldn’t be a problem, and churning out funny dialogue in that frame is a basic-level writing assignment. But no; or rather, Ghost Shark takes its lessons from all the wrong places. Rather than trying to be authentically funny, it’s inspired by terrible SyFy garbage, and believes that the goofy premise (a ghost shark eating people from a pool! A bathtub! A bucket! A cup of water!) is enough to call it a day. “In the SyFy tradition,” is enough of a warning, but to make it clear to anyone who has blissfully missed this slice of sub-cinematic disappointment: writer-director Griff Furst’s Ghost Shark is terrible. It’s a low-budget monster film that has little horror and practically no comedy. It’s all high-concept and incompetent execution, lazily running through the motions of filmmaking without having anyone bothering to make it good. Every single aspect of this film is awful—there was clearly a decision to push this forward as a gimmick in the hopes that social media would run with the inanity of the bite-sized memes without bothering to look at the entire thing. (If you’re having Sharknado flashbacks, you’re not crazy—both films came out on the SyFy channel within a six-week period in the summer of 2013—Sharknado on July 11, Ghost Shark on August 22—and were clearly aping the same business model.)  Alas, absent a live-tweeting crowd, the film is unbearable.