Fango spoke to longtime New Zealand producer Dale Bradley, who tackled his first job in Australia with MALIBU SHARK ATTACK, a killer-fish film that lensed in Queensland under the title GOBLIN SHARK ATTACK and premieres on the Sci Fi Channel (which co-produced the movie, and is soon to be known as Syfy) this summer. Bradley passed on a couple of production pics (see them below), and explains the flick’s odd original moniker.

The onscreen predators “are based on a species called goblin sharks [see art at bottom], which don’t look like your normal great white,” Bradley tells us. “They’re very fearsome-looking creatures. Ours are actually larger than the real thing, but modeled on them for the look that the CG company created. People do catch these things, but ours are monsters that get released from a big underground cavern during a seaquake. The resulting tsunami washes them ashore. Not only do car parks and basements get flooded, but we have sharks inside the buildings as well. There’s a recipe for something cool there.”



This production, whose plot is quite similar to that of the subsequently announced Russell Mulcahy project BAIT (see item here) stars local-born LA FEMME NIKITA star Peta Wilson as lifeguard heroine Heather. Her fellow cast members include Warren Christie, FINAL DESTINATION 3’s Chelan Simmons, BLOOD ANGELS’ Sonya Salomaa, Rachel Barton, Remi Broadway, Jeff Gannon and UNDEAD’s Mungo McKay. The director is BLOOD OF BEASTS’ David Lister, with previously announced helmer Brian Trenchard-Smith remaining on board as a producer.



“The central characters are lifeguards on Malibu Beach,” Bradley explains, “who survive the wave but get trapped under their building. The sharks know they are there and break in. There’s another great location—a construction site that’s also flooded—and the survivors manage to escape there, thinking it’s safe. But next thing, the sharks bash down the roller doors and swim inside, so they’re trapped in the basement. We’ve got a bit of ALIEN in there, and some good mayhem: amputations, people chopped in half. We shot one today featuring some lovely prosthetic work by makeup artist Sharon Robberts where a guy has lost both his legs. We’ve got another scene that’s a bit of a homage to JAWS 3-D, where a parasailor gets into all sorts of trouble and ends up being half the man he used to be.”



As the action gets more intense, this variation on the JAWS franchise also homages another mid-’70s genre classic, Bradley reveals. “The survivors attack the sharks with chainsaws and concrete cutters because it’s a construction site,” he says. “We got real dead sharks for those shots, but their skin is like steel. It was really hard to get a chainsaw to go through the skin of those sharks for close-ups.”