Sometimes while you’re reviewing a bunch of movies, you get to one and you stare at the blank page, wondering, how in glob’s name am I going to write about this? At some point, the review could literally be: It is what it is. I’m thinking about this now because that phrase just completely sums up my experience with Sky Sharks, a movie that, on paper, sounds gloriously up my alley.

We got flying sharks. We got Nazi zombies. We got a mix of fantastic CGI sitting right next to really bad CGI. We got a movie that was obviously made with a lot of love. We got a group of undead soldiers being sent to kill said Nazi zombies and their flying, genetically-modified sharks. We got a LA gang-member turned priest who tells his nun associate that, in his gang-life, “Satan parked his car right outside my door.” And while the nun seems perplexed, the priest continues the metaphorical story and tells her that Satan took a shit in his bathroom while ordering a pizza.

“Satan eats pizza?” the nun responds.

And this, dear readers, was about the only time I chuckled in this film.

The cold open is set on an airplane with a variety of characters I won’t even bother naming because not only are they all fodder but Sky Sharks has a terrible tendency to not tell the audience the characters’ names…and there’s way too many characters to be bothered with. On the plane, we see some men watching boobs on their inflight monitor. Another man is watching boobs through his camcorder. Another man tries to solicit sex from the flight attendant, while tossing casual homophobic remarks about the male flight attendant. And a kid plays a video game in which the main character is a fully nude woman.

I’m just saying if you’re interested in boobs, you’ve come to the right place.

Finally, we see dorsal fins cutting through the clouds as the sky sharks descend on the airplane. Excuse me, we get Nazi zombies piloting flying sharks who launch swastica-nets on the plane, jump aboard, kick their way in and, with a mix of green screen and CG, shoot and kill everyone on board. Heads explode. Jaws are ripped off. Decapitations, aplenty. Digital and practical effects galore. The one woman zombie unzips her jacket to show her zom-cleavage.

“Holy shit,” the priest says before his throat is torn out. It’s a mix of SyFy level CG and actually nice practical effects. But it’s a twelve minute sequence that quickly leaves our mind as we’re introduced to Angelique (Barbara Nedeljakova), who’s one of the few characters the movie actually immediately provides a name for, who speeds along a greenscreen highway in a car with the license plate that reads Hot 6IRL. Her father Dr. Klaus Richter (Thomas Morris), meanwhile, injects some serum into his body to keep himself at a fresh 75 years old.

Before we can learn much about them, we’re on an abandoned freighter where we watch two scientists having sex Aliens-marine-camera-style (with plenty of bouncing boobs, natch) before the naked woman gets dragged down a hallway and fed to sharks. While this is happening a blonde woman—it took 75 minutes to actually figure out her name is Diabla (Eva Habermann)—investigates the frozen freighter where the naked scientist was seen being dragged and she discovers dozens of nazi zombies and flying sharks.

Before we can learn much about this change—a reminder, we’re now nearly 40 minutes in—we get an exposition dump involving an incredibly extended sequence of the Nazis in the 1940s perfecting their zombie serum. Thankfully, after seeing the exposition played out, Diabla gives us a summary: “Let me summarize. Once these predators (i.e., the sharks) are in the air, nothing and no one is safe and they can play (?) invisible. That’s a disaster. So that’s what was in the water tanks (i.e., 20 minutes earlier in the freighter). Genetically mutated flying nazi sharks.”

Listen, there’s a lot of visual prowess going on here from director Marc Fehse, juvenile nudity aside. And I do mean juvenile nudity. For instance, Diabla gets infected early on and there’s literally a scene of her briefly transforming in the shower, arching her back and presenting her upturned butt to the camera as if she’s inviting the viewer to have sex…it’s pretty tasteless. But, again, once (if?) you get past the puerile nudity, the constant need to exposition dump and the fact the film plays out like a bunch of short films barely connected by said exposition, there’s some strong visual storytelling. In fact, the finale, set in the air with flying sharks, Nazi zombies, airplanes, explosions and a very large shark is thrilling to watch. I wanted more of that.

I can tell a lot of love went into crafting this film and the cameos from Tony Todd to Amanda Bearse to Mick Garris to lesser known but prolific actors like Robert LaSardo and Naomi Grossman are surprising. And the slinky, electro score by Nicolas Alvarez and Dennis Schuster is actually quite phenomenal and it kind of gives the entire movie a music video aesthetic that had me bopping along to it.

The truth is, it’s not the sometimes wonky CGI or the juvenile and tasteless bits of nudity and humor that ruined the movie for me. It boils down to the script that basically amounted to a bunch of action vignettes with nameless characters who take up exceeding amounts of screen time only to be introduced for the sole purpose of being killed. It’s that those same vignettes are barely helped together by the most incredibly boring exposition dumps to explain where we are in in the story. It’s that the synopsis explains that the story is about “a military task force called ‘Dead Flesh Four’” who are reanimated to save the world from the flying menace…when the task force isn’t even introduced until the last maybe fifteen minutes.

It’s a narrative that moves in twelve minute increments without a care in the world of telling an interesting story. Moments of hilarious gore brought down by another extended sequence to explain things that should have been off-handed comments. Worse, it’s a boring slog…which is something I never thought I’d write about a movie with flying sharks piloted by Nazi zombies.

So we’re back at the beginning. For some people, everything I wrote above will get their blood pumping. But for me, I’m like the guy in the movie who watches a kid playing a video game featuring a completely naked woman killing giant frogs: “Does your female lead at least get clothes when you reach the next level?”

If the game is anything like the movie? Nope.

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