Twenty 20-Sharks is a chronological survey of shark attack movies. In this entry, we have officially struck the bottom of the barrel.
When I decided to tackle a bunch of shark attack movies this year, the idea that I might have to watch a whole bunch of garbage was already baked into the cake. Most of these movies have fallen somewhere between “interesting but not really that good” to “oh my god why am I watching this?” Well folks, today we’ve hit a new rock bottom. A movie so incoherently bad that I actually found myself rewinding whole sections of it just to understand what it was trying to tell me. This isn’t just low-budget streaming slop. This isn’t even on the level of an Asylum-style mockbuster produced for a quick cash grab. This is Ninja vs Shark, legitimately one of the worst movies I have ever seen.
And even then, I feel the need to qualify that statement. Ninja vs Shark isn’t some fluke production from people who’ve never made a movie before. It’s no Manos: The Hands of Fate. Quite the opposite, in fact. This comes from the Japanese duo of director Kōichi Sakamoto and writer Junichiro Ashiki, who both have a long list of credits proving their filmmaking bona fides.
Kōichi Sakamoto got his start in the 1990s as a stunt coordinator on Hollywood productions like Scanner Cop, Beverly Hills Ninja and Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, the latter of which led him to working his way up the ladder on pretty much every Power Rangers series since, including making the jump over to the original Japanese iterations. Junichiro Ashiki, on the other hand, has almost exclusively worked as a writer on various Ultraman series. He’s written approximately 187 episodes of Ultraman since 2012, so it’s a safe assumption that the guy knows his Ultraman. In fact, Ninja vs Shark is the only credit to his name that isn’t about Ultraman.
Point is, these aren’t newcomers; this is the product of people who obviously know what they’re doing. And it’s not like I’ve never seen a wacky Japanese film before. I’m well aware of the fact that every country has its version of garbage cinema. It can be every bit as entertaining as the garbage we make here in the States. But what we have here in Ninja vs Shark is a film that seems determined to be as offputting and unlikeable as humanly possible right from the jump. Let’s dive in.
(Normally I’d post the movie’s trailer, but this time someone just put the whole thing up on YouTube. If you’d rather, though, you can watch the movie like I did: on Tubi1.)
Ninja vs Shark takes place in the small fishing village of Okitsu, currently held hostage by the Crimson Devil clan. The clan wants the village’s treasure trove of pearls, and has summoned a monstrous demon shark to eat any who ventures into the water to dive for pearls. As a result, the village faces certain doom2. The village chief begrudgingly hires the services of local samurai asshole Kotaro (Kohshu Hirano) to save the village from clan leader Koshiro (Shigeru Harihara3). Kotaro is aided in this mission by local couple Shinsuke (Shun Nishime) and Sayo (Juria Nagano), the latter of which is persona non grata to the town because they think she brought this evil upon them.
That’s the basic outline of what’s going on here. And even though the movie is a mercifully short 76 minutes, they’re also some of the longest 76 minutes you’ll ever experience4. But within that runtime are various tangents, such as several flashback scenes that establish the motivations of characters we’ve only just met. One of those is Kikuma (Kanon Miyahara), an evil ninja who’s out to sabotage Kotaro. She’s introduced early on, but midway through the film we watch as she and her brother plot to overthrow their own ninja clan. We eventually realize this is a flashback, as she ultimately kills her own brother in cold blood, and all this seems to only remind us that, oh right, she’s awful.
Then again, our hero’s pretty terrible too. The film introduces Kotaro after he’s just violated his previous employer’s wife. When the man confronts him about this, he considers it merely payment for services rendered. He then cuts the guy’s head off just for fun. Again, this is our hero. He makes no bones about the fact that he’s only in it for the money. (Or the… whatever.) And just in case we have any illusions about Kotaro being awful, we’re treated to a scene of the woman he just violated praying for her dead husband’s spirit. Kikuma encounters this woman, and after offering to pray with her, decides to kill her herself. Because the movie wants to establish exactly who we’re supposed to root for here. And it ain’t Kikuma.
And here’s where things get really fun, because that poor woman can’t find any peace for herself. Kikuma killed her because, guess what? She’s working for the Crimson Devil clan, and they need zombies to help do their bidding. Yep, there are zombies in this film too5. And because that isn’t crazy enough, the Crimson Devil clan turns out to be a shark-worshipping death cult. Koshiro feeds on his victims like a vampire, his entire face morphing into the shake of a shark’s mouth, and the feeding makes him young again. This is that kind of movie.
Now, I realize that just by describing all of this nonsense I may run the risk of making all this sound like something you’d want to watch. This is my gift; this is my curse. But please understand how deeply unpleasant all this wackiness actually is. Our hero is a rapist, our villain a bloodsucking vampire shark-man, and the town in question thinks the way to solve all of this is to sacrifice Sayo to the vengeful shark god. The movie takes all of this far too seriously than any of it deserves, and it’s just plain no fun. The blood splatter (and there is lots of it) is all cheap CGI, the demon shark is even worse, and at this point I’m not even sure I understand what I’m doing here anymore. This shit is just the pits…
FINAL RATING
0.5 stars (out of five). So bad, holy moly…
NEXT TIME: Meg 2: The Trench (2024)
- The People’s Streaming Service.
↩︎ - This is already almost literally the setup to the last film in our series, The Requin.
↩︎ - Or Yuichi Nakamura, depending on the scene, and there’s a reason for that.
↩︎ - Like Roger Ebert famously said, “No good movie is too long. No bad movie is short enough.”
↩︎ - One review on Letterboxd points out that there are actually more zombies in this film than there are sharks. ↩︎
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