Dir. Marc Fehse (2020)
A team of geologists uncover a secret Nazi lab where they were designing the ultimate killing machine: flying sharks.
Combining genres can be really interesting, especially if the genres themselves work well on their own. Nazisploitation and sharksploitation would not be at the top of my list for a mashup, yet here we are. Sky Sharks tells the story of a buried Nazi experiment in which sharks are trained to wrest control of the sky from superior Allied air combatants, suddenly let loose into a near-future world where they threaten to take over the world with their Nazi zombie pilots and an extremely low value of human life. A film that feels like a combination of Mad Heidi and Turbo Kid, Sky Sharks is an absolutely insane flick that I can't believe I've slept on for so long.
Former Nazi scientist Dr. Klaus Richter (Thomas Morris) runs a defense organization with his daughters Diabla (Eva Habermann) and Angelique (Barbara Nedeljakova) that tries to shut down threats around the world. When a secret Nazi research program that teaches sharks to fly and re-animates their fallen soldiers breaks free into the modern world, Richter et al., joins forces with America's own dead soldier program, called the Dead Flesh Force, to stop them. As the world threatens to collapse into explosive chaos and the Nazis try to take over the world once more, it's a battle for undead supremacy through land and sky. With sharks.
Sky Sharks may be the best Nazi zombie experimental flying shark movie that I've ever seen. Filled with horror royalty, including Tony Todd, Lynn Lowry, Naomi Grossman (who we interviewed!), Lar Park-Lincoln (Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood), and Amanda Bearse (Fright Night), to name a few, the film is a parade of recognizable faces and an Asylum-level cacophony of insanity. It's gory as all hell, complete nonsense, and exactly the level of entertainment that we should demand from our B-movie shark flicks. It's not only a hell of a lot better than I expected, it's also a hell of a lot better than it should be given the plot.
A pulsing rave-like score, fantastic kill scenes, and a quasi-futuristic plot that reaches far into the past to establish its framework, Sky Sharks is one of the craziest movies I've seen in quite a while. It's really difficult to describe what all happens in the film because it rarely makes sense, but it's so much damn fun to watch all of the madness unfold. It does slow down a little bit in the middle, but it picks up with a vengeance in the last half hour or so. The one gripe that I have with the film is its extreme over-reliance on CGI, because the vast majority of the effects are completely digital, but the practical effects that do exist in the film are stellar, which makes sense because Tom Savini served as the effects supervisor for the film.
Sky Sharks is greatly helped by the fact that I've watched a ton of terrible shark movies in preparation for this week. It's not a good movie, per se, and it's not one that most film fans will enjoy. There's a ton of exposition, to the film's detriment, but it's almost needed when dealing with a film that has such an insane premise. How else are you going to explain Nazi sharkplanes in general without some storytelling, much less introduce them into the "modern" world. The only thing this hurts is the flow of the film, which does slow down a good bit around the middle. But if you're looking for an insane film with a ton of guts and gore, this one will definitely be for you. I expected less than nothing going into this one, and what I got knocked my socks off. Batshit crazy film, and a hell of a watch to close out Shark Week 2024.
Who this movie is for: Sharksploitation fans, Nazisploitation lovers, Aquatic pilots
Bottom line: Sky Sharks is both colossally stupid and utterly fantastic, a conflagration of insane effects and a bonkers plot. It's a hell of a fun watch, especially as a fan of both Nazisploitation and sharksploitation. With a ton of recognizable faces and some stellar kills, this is the flying Nazi shark film that you didn't know you needed in your life. It's streaming free on Tubi, and it's a fantastic watch if you can turn off the logical part of your brain for a couple of hours. Check it out for sure.
