Just when I thought it was safe to go back to the SyFy channel… there’s more festive high-concept insanity with 2018’s audacious Santa Jaws. Between SyFy and DTV kings The Asylum, there have been about a gazillion shark attack movies in recent years, including at least six in the Sharknado franchise. We’ve seen so many variations in this mental genre, including robot sharks, ghost sharks, zombie sharks, even Jurassic sharks, so it was surely only a matter of time before they tackled a Christmas shark.
My expectations are low for this film where a boy’s comic book creation comes to life, bringing terror to a small coastal town at Christmas. However, it turns out to be some funny shit. Teenager Cody (Reid Miller) is a bit of a nerd, hanging out at the comic book store with pal Steve (Hawn Tran) where they work on their own comic about a killer shark with the powers of Evil Santa, or something.
There’s some vague nonsense about Cody’s Papa Joe (Ritchie Montgomery) gifting him an ancient magic fountain pen that, for reasons unexplained, brings illustrations to life. Sure enough, Santa Jaws springs from the pages and starts to menace the little harbour town, leaving Cody and Steve to try and convince everyone of what’s happening and to try and Save Christmas.
The film follows some silly rules that make it fun - the shark is attracted to all things Christmas and can only be killed or hurt by festive stuff, like decorations, trees etc, leading to some peculiar but memorable imagery. Brilliantly, the shark also swims about with a cute little Santa hat on its fin. The filmmakers are smart enough not to show us the crappy CGI shark very much, save for a few hilarious jump scare moments.
A lot of the one-liners are awful but there’s enough humourous invention to make this one worthwhile. The script keeps finding ways for people to get back in or close to the water, when surely that would be the last thing you’d want to do when there’s a shark on the loose in freezing December.
This movie feels more like a Goonies-style kid family friendly adventure than your usual SyFy shark attack flick, albeit one with some tame, not-too–graphic gore. Proof that Christmas, at the end of the day, is really all about the kids. There is some actual sweetness at the film’s centre with everyone working out their familial grievances by the end and banding together to annihilate the festive finned freak.
Relly, it’s impossible to hate a movie that has a family come together to fight the monster using Christmas turkeys stuffed with explosives. To sweeten the deal, there’s also plenty of jolly Christmas music used to bait the shark and terri-brill one-liners like “Ho ho ho, you son of a fish!” Yeah, it’s magical, though I am starting to question how I have managed to shoehorn Santa Jaws and Christmas Holiday into the same category…
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