Shades of mad doctors from old time horror movies.
Dr. Preston King (Jeffrey Coombs) is researching a cure for cancer. He is ultimately looking for a cure for his son Josh who is dying from the disease. His research has shown that sharks do not get cancer. In his desperation King experiments, using DNA, on his own son. The result is turning his son into a half shark half man creature.
King's research has gained the attention of a pharmaceutical company that King once worked with. King feels that the heads of this company have cheated him in the past and being a mad scientist he wants revenge. The big shots at the pharma company are not aware of King's madness or what his son has become. They are willing to trek over to King's secluded island full of mercenaries to discuss his discovery. King has different plans for them than just a chat.
There’s lots of action both with the shark eating people aspect of the movie as well as the mercenaries with machine guns and rocket launchers. It seems the bad doctor keeps a decent supply of said mercenaries on hand. Even so, he still manages to hire a lot of inept ones. Even so they do his bidding which makes them as crazy as he is. Or at the very least sadists.
We also have a lot of explosions. It seems that with helicopters and jeeps there is a need for a lot of gasoline on the island. And yes there is an exploding helicopter.
"Hammerhead: Shark Frenzy" AKA "SharkMan" was released in 2005 and was directed by Michael Oblowitz. I actually liked the fact that you rarely saw the whole Sharkman. It definitely made him scarier, at least for me, than he would have been. There were quite a few scary parts. And of course people with limbs bitten off. But it seems that there were just as many if not more people shot to death. Not by the mercenaries but by the heroes trapped on the island. One of them being William Forsythe who turns out is kickass in this. Jeffrey Coombs (“Re-animator”) does his usual superb job of playing insane. Hunter Tylo is also on board as Josh's former girlfriend.
I thought this was typical of the SYFY channel “B” movie genre. Maybe even a little better than a lot of them. It's definitely on the cheezy side and that's a good thing. I’ll give it a passing grade.