A front page article in our Las Cruces Sun-News this week told about the filming of three movies in and around our desert community about — wait for it — SHARKS!!! Two of the movies by the film company called The Asylum are entitled “Shark Shiver” and “Shark Frenzy” and the third apparently has not been named. The films will be released this summer.
And I thought the movie “Sharknado” was a stretch.
But wait, it gets better. The Asylum film studio was actually the one that produced the original Sharknado movie and has produced five sequels. And production is in the works for the 7th in the series which may or may not be filmed here in Las Cruces. And at least for one of the films, there was actually water involved with scenes filmed at Elephant Butte reservoir.
This is a quote from the article about the shark movie production plan from producer David Latt:
“… You ask yourself, how can you make any shark film in the middle of the desert?” he said. “It’s amazing what we can do
in post certainly, but as long as the actors are there and you have the essentials, you can really make anything work, and I think, at the end of the day, I think the audience will be captured … “
What’s frightening about his comment is how any video or photo can be manipulated so easily and how we have to be careful about what we see and think as being real.
It also speaks to the quality of these three films in that they were shot in a matter of three months. My wife and I recently watched the movie “Ben Hur” and were fascinated by the huge production effort to make that epic film. Planning for the film began in 1952 and it was not released until 1959. More than 10,000 extras were used in the film and the budget (1959 dollars) was more than $16 million. (More than $180 million in today’s dollars). I don’t know how big the budget was for the three locally produced shark movies, but the producer said they had used five local extras.
But I think the producers need to come back and produce a truly blockbuster movie featuring a shark that roamed the shallow seas covering much of New Mexico 30 million years ago. The creature was appropriately named “Godzilla Shark.” I mean, how much better movie title could you have.
And the plot goes like this:
A low-budget film crew is filming a shark movie at Elephant Butte when out of an underwater cave comes the pre-historic shark monster that has been reawakened from its fossilized remains. The shark fossil, in a layer of ancient seabed rock, was energized by radioactivity from the Manhattan Project’s first atomic bomb test just northeast of the lake. It comes out of the water onto the shores of Elephant Butte, walking with leg-like fins created by a genetic mutation, also from radiation exposure. It immediately eats the camera crew, then crawls eastward to Spaceport America, where — with its radioactively induced intelligence — manages to get aboard Sir Richard Branson’s low-orbit spacecraft. It launches itself and flies over the Gulf of Mexico where it suddenly gives birth to hundreds of babies. The spacecraft crashes into the water and all aboard survive. Suddenly the world is threatened by these intelligent voracious monsters with no less than 12 rows of teeth and an appetite for humans.
Okay, I’d better stop here because I’m expecting a phone call any moment from The Asylum studios to buy my script. Watch for me next year on the next Academy Awards for the best screenplay award.
aero-cordero.com 