The Movie:

The latest collaboration between the SyFy Channel and legendary B-movie movie mogul Roger Corman, Dinoshark was first shown on the cable channel a few months back and now lives again thanks to the magic of home video. When the film begins we learn how a thawing glacier unleashes a few prehistoric creatures known as Dinosharks who have been frozen in said glacier for countless centuries. A few years later, these baby Dinosharks are now full grown man-eating monsters heading south through the Pacific Ocean towards Mexico.

Arriving in Mexico around the same time is a tough guy named Trace McGraw (Eric Balfour) who has taken a job working on his friend's boat. Expecting to arrive and live the good life, enjoying the scenery and all that Mexico has to offer, McGraw is in pretty good spirits initially - but his outlook soon sours when he witnesses the death of two workers when they're attacked by a massive prehistoric monster. When the Dinoshark makes it personal by eating one of McGraw's closest friends, he decides to hunt down the creature and kill it before it can kill again. He won't be able to do this alone, however, so he enlists the aid of a scientist named Carol (Iva Hasperger), who is as beautiful as she is brilliant and for some reason works for a creepy horny guy who runs a hotel. Conveniently enough, Carol knows an actual Dinoshark expert named Dr. Frank Reeves (Roger Corman) - she found him on the internet, you see - and so she brings him onboard too, and before you know it the three are off to stops these horrible beasts from decimating the Mexican coastline.

Made fast and cheap in the grand Corman tradition, Dinoshark isn't subtle, clever or really very good but it knows what it wants to do, and that's entertain - on that level, it succeeds. It's full of massive plot holes (would a marine biology expert really try and trap a shark with pontoons?) and completely implausible characters and situations and it basically telegraphs an attack by proceeding each one with a few seconds of ominous music, but that doesn't matter. This is a movie called Dinoshark and it delivers exactly what you'd expect it to - a weird looking CGI monster attacking people and eating boats and taking out guys on jet skis. Honestly, when dealing with a film like this, there's not a whole lot more that matters. The film isn't original (it's almost a remake of Sharktopus made for SyFy last year) it doesn't need to be - the formula it follows is tried and true and proven entertainment.

As far as the acting goes, Eric Balfour isn't exactly the most charismatic guy and he tends to spend more time arguing with the guys in the Harbor Patrol than dealing with the Dinoshark problem, but he looks the part I guess if you don't love the guy, you don't hate him either. Iva Hasperger is actually given a fair bit more to do than top billed Balfour and she's fun to look at which takes some of the sting out of the fact that her performance is wooden. Throw in Corman himself as the wise old man of the group and if this isn't a trio that will go down in cinematic history, we've at least got a passable cast to kill some time with.

You don't watch Dinoshark for the acting though, you watch it for the monster attack sequences. We get those, and a little bit of moderate post attack gore effects too. Not meant to be taken in the least bit seriously, Dinoshark is big dumb fun.

Video:

Dinoshark looks good in this AVC encoded 1080p 1.78.1 widescreen transfer from Anchor Bay. The hokey digital effects stick out like a sore thumb here but that's the way the movie was made and not an issue with the disc itself. Colors are nice and bright and bold and well defined and black levels tend to be pretty strong as well. Flesh tones look a little bit warmer than they should but this probably has to do with the way it was shot. There aren't any problems with compression artifacts or edge enhancement issues but some scenes do look a bit on the flat side. For a low budget made for TV movie, however, the picture quality is pretty good.