Well, a couple of rich, spoiled students arrive at a
mansion that they’ve rented while in town for two oceanic field trips. Four
others soon arrive, along with Pamela, their teacher. While one girl
(supposedly the nerdy, awkward girl) walks around the house, porn music plays.
It’s confusing, because this girl has her clothes on. She stares out the window
at one of the guys swimming in the pool, and the film cuts back and forth
between her face and him swimming. It cuts back and forth many, many times,
while the porn music continues. But nothing happens, and neither of them is
naked. It just goes on and on, and I began to wonder if it was on some loop, or
if I were supposed to be seeing something important in her face, some thought
or emotion. But no.
Alyssa (identified as the weird student) appears with
what seems to be the nice boy. But Alyssa seems like kind of a bitch. Her
father was apparently an oceanic anthropologist, and nerdy Jess, who is also a
bitch, mentions, “There’s still a mystery
about how he died.” Then she whines, “She
shouldn’t get a better grade because her dad died – that’s not fair.” Whoa!
By the way, these six students are taking a class on oceanic anthropology, and
apparently they’re supposed to be in high school (we know because one talks
about getting into college). It seems like they’re quite a bit older, and one
of them, Marcie, is clearly a moron, and you wonder just how she got into this
class. Maybe in your twelfth year of high school, you get special treatment.
Well, it doesn’t matter.
Alyssa asks the teacher if her dad is coming back. Pamela
answers: “No. All I know about the ocean
is that she guards her secrets well.” Wait, if that’s all you know about
the ocean, how are you teaching this class? Anyway, she tells Alyssa to write
about her dad, saying it will really help her. She says this twice, so I guess
she believes it. She also tells Alyssa she doesn’t have to go on the oceanic
field trips, which is the whole point of them being there. Is Pamela the worst
teacher ever?
It seems that Pamela thinks she’ll score with Alyssa. “We’ll just talk and we’ll see where it leads
us,” Pamela says to her. By the way, Pamela is played by Donna Wilkes, who
was in Jaws 2 and also starred in Angel. Anyway, so we don’t get bored,
the film keeps cutting to stock footage of sharks, some of which seems to have
been shot in an aquarium (or are we to believe there are red and blue lights
hanging over the ocean?). And Jess tells us the story of Alyssa’s father, how
he stole objects from indigenous peoples and sold them. Apparently he found
some Indians who worshiped a great white shark, and he organized a hunt and
killed the shark, which is actually pretty funny.
Well, the porn music returns as Pamela watches one of the
male students showering. He showers like a girl, being sure not to get his hair
wet. What’s up with that? Well, the two of them are in on some scheme to write
a best seller about Alyssa’s father, a nice little development. A crazier
development is where Bryce pretends to like Alyssa, and they kiss by the pool,
and then Alyssa turns into a shark and bites Bryce’s head off. It is fucking
wonderful. Instead of giving Bryce head, she takes it. Soon after that, the
teacher asks her, “Are you hungry?” “No, I’m feeling kind of full,” Alyssa
says. Perfect!
Marcie was secretly filming the Bryce and Alyssa scene
with her phone, but later when one of the other students finds the phone and
looks at the footage, the perspective is all wrong. It’s the same footage we
saw, rather than new footage from Marcie’s perspective. And the footage doesn’t
keep the boy from wanting to have sex with Alyssa. Hey, maybe he’s into fish.
So much for the nice boy. And then with nine minutes left in the film, we
return to one of the shots of the Beverly Hills sign, just in case you’ve
forgotten where this all takes place.
The teacher sees the headless body of one of the students,
and hardly reacts at all. “Is that Tyler
in the pool?” she asks. She must have worked at some tough schools before
this one. By the way, the DVD contains a commentary track by the director, and
in it he says he shot the film in two days. What? Two days? That’s basically
impossible. No wonder he keeps repeating shots and going back to stock footage.
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