Movie #665: Sharks in Venice

Sharks in Venice is...well, let's generously call it a horror movie, starring Stephen Baldwin, Vanessa Johansson (older sister of Scarlett!), Hilda van der Meulen, Giacomo Gonella, and a whoooole lotta stock footage of sharks. 

We start off in Venice with some establishing shots, and then cut to someone's pool where three dudes wearing masks that clearly have rebreathers in their mouths but are still able to talk are diving for treasure. They find a clue in Latin, but then are attacked by a shaky camera superimposed with a shark's mouth from a nature documentary and some "blood" in the water, and they all dead.

Turns out one of the dudes was the father of noted...professor? Oceanographer? David Franks (Baldwin, the one and only name actor in this travesty). He gets the news that his father has vanished, goes to Venice, is shown the bodies of the other two dudes which have clearly been ripped up by a shark, and everyone in the room proceeds to do their best recreation-from-memory of the argument between Brody and the Mayor in Jaws. 

Anyway, it turns out that (deep breath) there's some treasure down there in the canals that was brought by by the Medici family in the late 13th century during the 8th Crusade (which was commissioned by Louis XIV), and there's an evil mob boss (Gonella) who wants that treasure so bad, and he's the one who introduced the sharks into the canals of Venice for...reasons? I don't remember him ever really explaining that, but honestly it's not like the dialog makes a lot of sense. 

Betrayals! Gunfights! Sharks! Police! The same shot of the police, reused three times! And then it ends, the mob boss gets eaten by his own sharks, the good guys laugh and wink at each other and the matter of there being sharks in the canals of Venice, which were just LEAPING UP AND EATING GONDOLIERS A FEW SCENES AGO is never resolved. 

Um, this is a legitimately terrible, MST3K-grade movie. I got it as a gift a really long time ago from someone who knew the rules of the movie project (to wit: if I own it and it had a theatrical release, I have to watch it at least once when it comes up in the rotation), and the tragedy is that we've lost contact over the years so I can't tell her that I finally watched it. But whatever. I'm actually glad I saw it, because it's funny as hell. 

My Grade: F-
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT

Next up: Shaun of the Dead