Taylor Jorgensen | Through the Shattered Lens

Right now, we’re in the middle of SyFy’s Sharknado week. On Sunday night, SyFy will premiering what they say is going to be The Last Sharknado. In the days leading up to that moment, they’ve been reshowing all of their classic shark films and premiering a new shark film each night!

Wednesday night’s premiere was Frenzy.

Frenzy‘s a bit different from some of the other shark films that SyFy’s been showing this week. Make no mistake, the film did feature sharks. In fact, there were three very big sharks who swam through the ocean and ate just about anyone or anything that they could sink their teeth into. Not only did they eat people who were unfortunate enough to be floating out in the water but they also bumped up against boats, the better to knock poachers overboard. These were some mean sharks!

That said, they weren’t ghost sharks. They weren’t zombie sharks. None of them wore a little Santa cap on their fin, like Santa Jaws did. They weren’t mutated by radiation or a Big Evil Corporation. And certainly, they weren’t dropped into the ocean by a tornado. No, these were just normal, very big sharks.

And while the sharks were undoubtedly important to the story that Frenzy was telling, the film really wasn’t about them. Instead, at its heart, Frenzy is the story of two sisters, Paige (Gina Vitori) and Lindsey (Aubrey Reynolds). Paige has always been the adventurous one while Lindsey has always been the one who rarely takes risks and who tries to play it safe. Paige has found fame as a travel vlogger. Along with Evan (Michael S. New), Kahia (Lanett Tachel) and Seb (Taylor Jorgensen), she travels around the world and she films herself doing dangerous things and having new experiences. When Lindsey joins Paige for her latest adventure, it seems like a chance for Lindsey to not only break out for her shell but to also find romance with Seb as well…

Of course, things never go quite as smoothly as they’re supposed to. In this case, things go downhill as soon as Paige, Lindsey, and everyone else gets aboard a less-than-reliable seaplane so that they can go scuba diving. When the plane crashes into the middle of the ocean, Lindsey and a few survivors are left floating in the water. There’s an island in the distance but can they reach it before the sharks reach them?

Frenzy was definitely a change-of-pace, as far as SyFy shark movies are concerned. While I wouldn’t say that you necessarily have to have a sister to truly appreciate Frenzy‘s story, it undoubtedly helps. The relationship between Paige and Lindsey — made up of equal parts love and rivalry — is at the heart of Frenzy and fortunately, both Aubrey Reynolds and Gina Vitori were totally believable as sisters. Their relationship, with all of its complications, felt real and, on a personal level, there were many lines of dialogue and little actions to which I related. For me, as I watched, this film could have just as easily been called “Lisa And Erin Go On Vacation And Try Not To Die.”

I also liked the way that the film used its flashback structure. With Lindsey continually flashing back between the past and the present, we were kept off-balance as far as Lindsey’s current mental state was concerned. It’s a structure that required us to consider what was real, what was dreamed, and what was just a hallucination.

Frenzy was a nice change-of-pace for Sharknado week.

You know what?

If you’re in high school and you’re planning on skipping prom so that you can go hang out at the “anti-prom” (which is being held in a creepy old cabin) and drink beer and smoke pot and maybe have unprotected sex … well, then you’re probably guaranteeing yourself a lot of great memories. But, even with that in mind, don’t do it at Shadow Creek.

Seriously, just the fact that it’s called Shadow Creek should be enough of a clue that you need to avoid the place. It’s always possible that Shadow Creek was named after the famed explorer, Jean LeShadow, but it’s even more likely that Shadow Creek is in some way haunted.

And if you arrive at Shadow Creek and everyone is sitting around a campfire and telling a story about a murder that happened at Shadow Creek many, many years ago, that’s probably an indication that you should have just gone to the regular prom. I mean, you might not have as much as fun at the regular prom as you would at the anti-prom but at least you would be hanging out with the rich kids and you wouldn’t run the risk of getting brutally murdered.

However, if you stay at Shadow Creek even after the campfire ghost story, one thing that you must NOT do is get offended over something and then run off by yourself. And if you come across another cabin — especially if that cabin has a corpse in front of it, don’t go inside. Don’t go anywhere near it.

That’s the main lesson to be learned from Shadows of the Dead, which, last Saturday, became the latest film to premiere as a part of SyFy’s 31 Days of Halloween. Shadows of the Dead was an occasionally atmospheric, occasionally effective, and often rather silly horror film.

Shadows of the Dead opens up with the anti-prom at Shadow Creek and then goes on to follow several teenagers as their stalked by a shadowy monster. I have to admit that I was never quite sure what the shadow monster was exactly. (A lot of people on twitter speculated that it was Lost‘s smoke monster.) The movie established that it could only attack people when they were alone and when they were in the dark. Apparently, after attacking, the monster would enter its victim’s body and stay there until it eventually decided to burst back out. As a result, we got a lot of scenes of people literally exploding. It got messy after a while.

But oddly, the Shadow Monster’s powers tended to change from scene to scene. Essentially, the monster could do whatever was needed to move a scene along. As well, the monster was pretty much invulnerable until the film needed to end, at which point it suddenly became vulnerable. There was no real consistency to this shadow monster but then again, Shadows of the Dead is not the type of film that demands consistency. The monster had its frightening moments and its ever-shifting powers led to some nicely surreal moments. Ultimately, your enjoyment of this film will depend on how seriously you take it. (Needless to say, taking it seriously in any way would be a mistake.)

That said, the most interesting thing about Shadows of the Dead was how much of it appeared to have been lifted from It Follows. Considering that the same can be said about The Crooked Man, it appears that It Follows has emerged as the new template for low-budget horror movies.