When he’s not practicing black magick, the “perfectly oiled killing machine” Ricky Valente fights the Mexican yakuza. They’re a cult of red-robed ninjas who deal coke and worship a shark god. Ergo, Narco Shark.
Lest ye think Gerardo Preciado’s $10K epic is yet another lazy exercise in microcinema’s put-on-a-shark-on-it obsession, the ocean predator is incidental, even removable. The flick would work just as well without it, being a gleeful genre parody informed by a lifetime’s consumption of direct-to-video Mexitrash action, half-assed kung-fu tapes, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. And yeah, probably something with a shark.
Valente’s gift is neither his mullet nor his fanny pack, but his hypnotic pull on others by playing “the sexy sax.” Just witness the boiling horniness of his fully naked wife as he blows the instrument an inch from her Barbie-smooth ladyparts. (She’s played by a department-store mannequin.) Her brother, Tico Suave, desperately wants Ricky to teach him how to be cool instead of a bucktoothed, bespectacled, friend-free weirdo who, I suspect, collects orders from area grammar schools establishing acceptable radii. Ricky eventually relents; the lesson involves breakdancing.
Presented as a VHS cassette from 1989, Narco Shark opens with a (fake) note that Suave died during the film’s making, so Preciado has used all the tools at his disposal — alt takes, doubles, mo-cap recreations and other Furious 7-sounding tricks — to allow for completion. A title card promises, “You will not be able to tell the difference,” which of course sets up a running joke that never tires.
That goes for the movie’s whole as well. Usually these spoofs with few resources have one joke to tell and stretch it past a breaking point, often by the 10-minute mark. Remarkably, Preciado knows just when to quickly pivot to something else, whether cutting to commercial or even fast-forwarding itself.
No matter how lo the fi, Preciado isn’t dicking around; this is at least a couple levels up from that. So boneheaded and yet sharp-witted, it earns a spot in the same league as similarly minded ’80s pastiches Dude Bro Party Massacre III and Lethal Force. Narco Shark’s faux FBI warning orders in part, “Do not see this film by yourself. It is meant to be seen by a party of at least 4 people.” Although I endorse that thinking, I had a blast watching all by my lonesome. —Rod Lott