5-Headed Shark Attack (2017)

There is a new species occupying the ocean: the 5-Headed Shark is all heads and teeth. Shaped like a demented starfish, this monster terrorizes the open ocean before invading the beaches of Puerto Rico, endangering a once peaceful beach-side paradise. 

REVIEW: The first two movies in this series, 2-Headed Shark Attack and 3-Headed Shark Attack are among my top favorite Asylum movies. Unfortunately, 5-Headed Shark Attack was a huge step down.

The first two movies were each pretty unique and did some good stuff to set themselves out from the hundreds (or close to it) of other SyFy Channel/Asylum shark movies. They were the first to go the multi-headed route, they had pretty good plots, used interesting locations (a small island atoll and a research station in the ocean), and they actually had some decent plot twists and unexpected deaths. This one though doesn't really have any of that, and other than the fact that the shark has multiple heads it's pretty much the exact same as any other overly-generic cookie-cutter SyFy Channel shark movie, following the basic generic formula to a T - A shark is killing people near the shore of a bay town, a group of people start trying to track it down and kill it. That's literally it. The exact same as pretty much 99% of SyFy shark movies.

There's not even really any fun or memorable cheesy scenes, outside of a couple near the beginning, as that would require them to actually utilize the fact that this shark has 5 heads, which the movie rarely does. It almost feels like this script was written for some other generic random Asylum shark movie but they decided last minute to make it part of the multi-headed series so they made the CGI model have multiple heads instead of one. I know that's not the case, but that is 100% what it feels like.

On top of that, you hardly get to know any of the characters in this one, save for a couple, because there's never any down time. If we get even 2 minutes of character moments between each chase or attack scene, that's it. Characters were dying and I had a hard time even trying to remember which characters they were.

If you're not as accustomed to these types of movies as I am, you'll probably find it more enjoyable than I did, it's just at this point I've seen so many shark movies that are pretty much identical to this, I need something more than just the shark having multiple heads to keep my interest, especially when those multiple heads are hardly utilized.

Luckily there is a few positives here to help with just that. Both the acting and special effects are actually rather quite good for an Asylum production, the movie was shot beautifully, and there's quite a bit of blood and gore, so from a technical aspect at least the movie was well-made, I just wish that from a story aspect it was equally as good.

4/10 rooms in the Psych Ward