Welcome to another edition of PICKIN' THE CARCASS, the movie column that looks at horror movies you missed the first time around.

I'm in the mood for some carcass pickin' right now. I mean, here we are in March already, and I have to say, the horror movies of 2009 have been a bust. It's pretty bad when the genre film I've enjoyed most so far this year has been CORALINE, the dark animated kids' movie based on the story by Neil Gaiman.

I'm hungry for some quality horror.

Time to pick the carcass! What tasty treat do we have in store for us today?

Hmm. Something called SHARKS IN VENICE (2008), now available on DVD. Sounds campy. It has that SNAKES ON A PLANE ring going for it. Maybe it'll be that undiscovered gem I'm looking for.

Then again, maybe not.

In SHARKS IN VENICE (2008), teacher and archeologist David Franks (Stephen Baldwin) receives the sad news that his father has been involved in some sort of underwater accident in Venice and has gone missing. David and his girlfriend Laura (Vanessa Johansson) travel to Venice to search for David's father.

In Venice, David and Laura learn that David's father was working for mobster Vito Clemenza (Giacomo Gonnella), helping him search for an ancient underwater Medici treasure when a "boating accident" occurred. David examines the bodies of the victims and declares that it wasn't a boating accident, but sharks. Anyone who's seen JAWS has seen this scene before, and Richard Dreyfuss plays it a helluva lot better! Of course, the police inform David that contrary to the title of the movie, there aren't any sharks in Venice.

Our American hero and his girlfriend dig deeper and eventually confront the evil mobster and learn that the sharks were put into the Venice waters on purpose by our friendly neighborhood bad guy to act as "guard dogs" so no one else can get the treasure, which seems like a monumental waste of time and energy since no one else but the mobster seems to know the treasure is even there! Chases, shoot-outs, and fights ensue, none of which are all that interesting or memorable, and by the time this film ends, you won't care one way or the other which side wins, the good guys or the bad guys, but in a movie as predictable and lame as this one, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out who wins.

SHARKS IN VENICE is a horrible horror movie. Actually, it's not even really a horror movie. It plays much more like an action film, and a pretty bad one at that, which is too bad, because it's marketed as horror, and with a title like SHARKS IN VENICE, you'd expect it to be at least fun, to at least have some teeth (heh, heh), but sadly it's got about as much bite as an old lady's gums. Yuck! SHARKS IN VENICE is not an undiscovered gem. It's a putrid pebble.

What about the sharks? Aren't there sharks in this movie?

Oh yeah, the sharks. You know, the sharp toothed critters are almost an afterthought here. The special effects are awful. The sharks look fake. They're shot swimming at excessive speeds, which I suppose was done to show how fast they swim in reality, but seen on screen it looks like fast motion and is laughable.

JAWS (1975), that screen classic that still has no equal in terms of ocean horrors and suspense, makes this movie look like a commercial for tuna fish. Even the JAWS sequels are better than SHARKS IN VENICE, and if you've seen JAWS 3 (1983) and JAWS: THE REVENGE (1987), two very bad movies, you can imagine how bad this one is. And that's about all you should do, too: imagine. Don't see it for yourself.

In fact, SHARKS IN VENICE is one of the worst "shark" movies I've ever seen. Not only doesn't it come close to the JAWS movies, but it's no where near as successful as some of the other shark movies over the years, such as DEEP BLUE SEA (1999) and OPEN WATER (2004).

It's rated "R," and it has to be one of the lamest "R" rated horror movies I've seen in quite a while. The gore hardly warrants even a PG rating, let alone R. Not that a movie like this has to be gory to be scary--- it doesn't--- but in a case like this where you're looking for anything to help the movie out, some more blood, or at least realistic blood, would have been welcome. But there's more wrong with SHARKS IN VENICE than just not having enough gore.

Both the script by Les Weldon and the direction by Danny Lerner are ho hum at best. The movie generates little suspense, and the characters are dull and cliche. Giacomo Gonnella as mobster Vito Clemenza, for example, is about as menacing as a villain in a kids' movie. In fact, some Disney villains are scarier! It's a combination of lackluster writing and average acting. I kept thinking what an actor like Al Pacino could have done with the role. One thing Pacino would have done is he would have made the guy scary, a guy you wouldn't want to mess with, a guy who'd make your heart race when he spoke to the heroes in the movie. Instead, we have a guy better suited to take on Maxwell Smart than the protagonists in a horror movie.

The acting is average at best. Stephen Baldwin in the lead fluctuates a great deal. Sometimes he's fine, and you're thinking, "He's not a bad actor. He's pretty good." But other times he looks like a fish out of water. He makes a lousy action hero as well, as he's not very believable when he's out-muscling the bad guy's henchmen. He also looks silly when he runs.

Hilda van der Meulen as Lt. Sofia Totti, and Atanas Srebrev as Captain Bonasera of the Venice police department are OK, but Vanessa Johansson as David's girlfriend Laura doesn't fare as well. I mean, she's OK, but when you notice someone's acting, that usually raises a red flag.

The music score by Stephen Edwards is actually pretty good, as long as you're not expecting anything memorable like John Williams's JAWS score. The music is actually my favorite part of the movie. It's lively and has some oomph to it, which the rest of the movie lacks and so desperately needs. Alas, however, a good music score all by its lonesome cannot save an entire movie.

SHARKS IN VENICE is not worth one second of your time. Other than a lively music score, it has no redeeming features, except perhaps for its catchy title. But that's it. There's nothing else in this movie worth catching, so if you happen to come across this stinker on DVD or on your digital cable system, hold your nose and toss it back to the ocean where it belongs.

If you've ever lived near the ocean, you know that at times from the water comes a terrible stink. You hold your nose and shake your head and look forward to the smell going away, which it will, eventually.

Watching SHARKS IN VENICE is a lot like smelling that stink from the ocean. You just can't wait for it to be over.


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