IMDB’s Description:
Shaped like a demented starfish, a monster 5-headed shark terrorizes the open ocean before invading the beaches of Puerto Rico, endangering the once peaceful island paradise.
This movie is apparently the third in what is at least four ‘X Headed Shark Attack’ movies, the first being 2 Headed Shark Attack, and the second being 3 Headed Shark Attack, produced by the SyFy Network. Now I firmly believe there should be a hyphen in that title between the number and headed, but whatever. I haven’t see the first two movies, but because we jumped from 2 to 5 heads in three movies, I expect this movie to be at least 2.5 times better than the original.
The movie opens on a boat somewhere near Puerto Rico. Two men are photographing 4 moderately attractive women, presumably as some sort of photo shoot (but possible to just get some sexy-times). None of these characters names are important, as you will soon learn. After wasting about five minutes on pointless closeups of girls in bikinis, one of the girls notices a disturbance out on the water. This isn’t Jaws (as much as this movie wants to be), where the movie spends most of its time eluding to the monster to have a big reveal near the end. Instead, the movie immediately shows us a great white shark, and then a four-headed shark (that number is correct) eats it. The main photographer gets all excited and starts clicking away on his camera as all six people stand on the stern looking at the large shark fin. Then the four-headed shark rears out of the water and with four mouths instantly consumes six people.
Now we cut to two police people, a man and a woman. I would like to tell you their character and real life names, but IMDB’s page is so sparse I am not sure which two people they are. For simplicity’s sake we’ll call the guy Not Brody, and the woman Lady Brody. This is because the female policewoman acts similar to the character of Martin Brody from Jaws, whereas the guy acts more like Mayor Vaughn, and since he is Lady Brody’s superior, she has to go along will all his stupid ideas. Anyways, they get a call that there might have been a shark attack. So they go out to the boat and find the camera and a bunch of blood. I’m not sure who called it is, or how that person thought it was a shark attack without investigating anything, but whatevs. On the camera is a blurry picture of the four-headed shark.
The cops take it to what I guess passes as specialists in Puerto Rico, i.e. they go to a local aquarium and ask them. The aquarium is run by Thaddeus Marshall (Jeffrey Holsman), and he employs Dr. Angie Yost (Nikki Howard) Phd (a.k.a. Matt Hooper in Jaws), and her team of 5 Marine Biologist interns. I immediately learned three things about Marine Biologists based on their portrayal in this movie. One, they are all vegans. Two, they hate mankind for their blatant disregard for the environment. And three, they are all idiots.
The cops show Dr. Yost and her boss the picture of the four-headed shark from the camera. Thaddeus is adamant that such a creature could never exist and the photo is a hoax. Dr Yost says there is a precedent for multi-headed animals and uses the two-headed dog Cerberus from Greek mythology as an example. Yes, not only does she get the number of heads wrong (much like this movie), but she also uses a fictitious creature to argue her point in favor of this being real. This is what I think happened, the writers (I use that term loosely) performed a Google search for two-headed animals, it took them to the Wikipedia page for Polycephaly, and they saw Cerberus listed in the section under Greek Mythology. At that point they turned their brains off and wrote “Cerberus and two-headed” on to the napkin that was acting as the working script.
I guess it doesn’t matter though. Boss man overrides her and she says that four-headed shark is very unlikely. The cops leave, and now we cut to a docked boat with the interns, Dr. Yost, and Thaddeus loading it up. Thaddeus wants to capture this abomination to save his struggling aquarium, and he strong-arms his team into doing it. His team is all “this is wrong”, and “this is illegal”, and “as marine biologists we swore an oath to hate the capture and study of animals even though that is literally our job.” Anyways, Thaddeus wins the day and team begrudgingly goes looking for the shark.
It doesn’t take long, soon enough they are throwing chum in the water and the shark shows up. I didn’t bother giving the interns names, because like interns in real life, they are disposable and naming them is just a vain attempt to humanize them. The next hour of this movie can be (and will be) summarized like this. Interns, other people, and other marine life (like a humpback whale) are randomly killed off by the four-headed shark. Remember how I called the main cop Not Brody? This is because at every turn he is looking for an excuse to declare the shark dead, and the beaches safe. His whole agenda is making the issue as small as possible so the beaches stay open, i.e. the mayor in Jaws. His partner, Lady Brody, is always saying things like “maybe we should tell people to be careful of this massive four-headed shark” and he’s always like “naw, I’ll bet that tiny harpoon killed it, keep the beaches open!”
Eventually Dr. Yost teams up with a guy she obviously dated before, but also despises because he is a fisherman, and once had a run in with a tiger shark that he killed with his bare hands or something. This character is called Red (Chris Bruno), because when he came out of the water after “murdering” the tiger shark he was covered in both his and the tiger’s blood. He is the only actor in this film with more than six credits to his name, and is likely the only one anyone might recognize. His Jaws lookalike character is Quint. They team up, and then have a surprisingly hard time finding the shark, even though the team before found it almost immediately. All is not lost though, except the lives of a couple of more interns, because they eventually find it. The cops are doing their own search, and then Lady Brody dies, at least, probably. A couple of times I had to leave the room and come back, and I didn’t bother to pause. She isn’t there at the end of the movie, so I assume she didn’t make it.
Now we come to the big reveal, the four-headed shark does in fact have five mouths, but the fifth mouth/face is on its tail. Both the movie description, and characters in the film describe the shark as “starfish shaped.” This is disappointing, because most of the people in the film are marine biologists and yet they clearly don’t know what a starfish looks like. And the people in real-life probably know what a starfish looks like, and yet the four-headed shark with a face for its tail looks more like a fork than a starfish.
Eventually Not Brody has his boat disabled by four-heads-and-a-face-tail shark, but the movie keeps cutting back to him on the radio, because they’ve got minutes to fill. Red’s boat is also disabled, but they manage to fight the shark with depth charges, and actually blow something up. I looked at the clock at this point, and there were still twenty minutes left. I thought “what is this movie going to do for another twenty minutes since the shark is dead.” But surprise! The shark wasn’t dead. This is another thing I thought I could go back and double check to see what they actually killed, but I didn’t. Eventually they broadcast some dolphin sonar to drive the shark away. This was one of the things they discussed in the middle of the movie to which I was only half paying attention to and didn’t think would pay off in the end. The issue here being that they just drove it off though (at least as far as I remember). Which means it could return. But it probably won’t, because the next movie is titled 6 Headed Shark Attack. If this movie is any indication, that shark will have four heads on the front, one shark face on the tail, and another face on its top fin.