Avalanche Sharks (2013)

If you haven’t been paying attention to the news lately, you might not be aware that sharks are turning up in some unexpected places – in Venice, in swamps, even in snow. Avalanche Sharks is a film that shows us that sharks can even turn up in someone’s mind. Yes, that’s right, everything that happens in the movie is just a story that a character within the movie tells.

A guy in a hospital wants to tell his sexy hallucination the story of how he broke his leg. And we see the story (well, except he never actually tells how he broke his leg, but no matter). Some guy sets off some explosives on a mountain where two guys are snowboarding. There is no reason for him to set off those explosives, but they apparently wake up some glowing alien sharks, who quickly eat the snowboarders. Meanwhile some arrogant little bitch named Becca and her friend get a ride to Mammoth from a guy named Randy. And Randy – is Randy the guy from the beginning? Not sure – tells them a story on the way there. A story within a story? Well, we see this one too, and it involves hundreds of intelligent space sharks searching for a new planet. (Isn’t this the basis for Scientology?) One of the shark pods lands on Mammoth.

Anyway, it’s spring break, and there are a lot of girls on the mountain, though it’s impossible to tell just how many, because they’re all blondes, and I have trouble telling them apart. One of the blondes is a marine biologist. Good thing she’s on this mountain. Good thing her boyfriend or father or uncle or whoever he is told us she’s a marine biologist, because obviously this will come into play later. Except it actually never does. It’s never mentioned again. And weirdly, an old guy refers to the glowing sharks by the word invented by Randy in his story to the girls – skookum, or something like that. So apparently we’re still within the story within the story within the movie. Oh boy. That means that anything that happens doesn’t even matter within the world of the film, let alone to those of us watching.

As you might expect, there is a lot of silliness in this film. As in Snow Shark, the avalanche sharks are able to travel in snow that’s only a few inches deep. But I like that a child’s drawing from twenty-five years ago is still in the sheriff’s cabinet, but that he apparently has never seen it. The sheriff’s office is actually at the ski resort, which is also odd. Odder still is that the owner of the Mammoth ski resort is able to fire the sheriff and give the job to the head of his ski patrol. Okay. The blonde who drew that picture twenty-five years earlier says these sharks killed her parents, and that there is some Native American legend about these sharks swimming up a river and ending up in the ice. So they didn’t travel through space?

Back in the hospital, the guy’s hallucination gets angry with the inconsistencies in his story. So I guess the hallucination is the character we’re supposed to side with in this film. And because the whole thing is a story made up by a character within the imagination of a character within the film, should I even bother to point out weird plot problems, like that some chick rides up the mountain in a gondola with one guy, presumably to ski, only to be shown moments later riding on the back of some other guy’s snowmobile? Probably not.

And while a lot of people are fighting the sharks, some oriental chick (and I love that the hallucination refers to her as an “oriental chick”) quietly becomes the hero of this story within the story within the film. And then the movie takes us to Mars for some reason. But don’t worry about that.