Horror Movie Review: 90210 Shark Attack (2014)

Serving as director and co-writer alongside Charlie Meadows, David DeCoteau delivers one of his worst movies to date. Called 90210 Shark Attack, it stars Donna Wilkes, Rachel Rosenstein, Braden Bacha, Jeffrey Decker, Jud Birza, and Stephanie Shemanski.

A group of college students are staying at a lovely summer house, alongside their teacher, in preparation for a marine anthropology field trip. The group are a bunch of walking cliches with nothing memorable about them, aside from their single defining characteristic. Horny, mean, nerd, loner… and that is it.

The teacher, Pamela, has a real hard time keeping them in line but doesn’t help her own cause by secretly having sex with one of the students and seemingly having an ulterior motive for bringing another. This person is Alyssa, whose father did some bad things once upon a time, and Pamela is trying to make her face up to it. Or something like that. The film is so boring and the dialogue is so bad, paying attention to the barebones plot is a struggle.

All you really need to know is that Alyssa has a cursed shark tooth necklace and for some reason, it makes her transform into a shark and kill people. An effect that must be seen, to be believed.

There are other sharks, as DeCoteau fills the film with stock footage of them swimming in an aquarium. Alongside stock footage of a beach, shots of the house (someone was enjoying the location) and Beverley Hills in general. It’s certainly money well spent, if you’re after a movie that seems more like a sell of a holiday destination, more than anything else.

90210 Shark Attack is hilariously bad, but not in a ‘so bad, it’s good’ kind of way. You’ll be laughing, but it’s a laugh of shock and horror. We have acting that absolutely stinks, but no-one could make the dialogue in this movie sound good. A story that is simply pathetic, with absolutely no effort made to make it coherent or entertaining. Then we have effects that are super-shoddy, which is par for the course with a film like this.

Finally, we get to the thing that always makes a David DeCoteau flick notable, and that’s his admiration of the male figure. It will not come as too much of a surprise to find out that, as always, we get lingering shots of the male torso. Including one lengthy shower scene that is up there with some of what he did in his Brotherhood series. Whereas the quality of a DeCoteau directed movie is always in question, this aspect is almost always a guarantee.