There are two well-known tropes in the world of Horror Movies. The killer shark and the haunted doll. But what if, and hear me out now, we combine these two into one movie? I present the sh*tty cinema known as “Doll Shark” from 2022. 


The movie opens with a dude-bro with a sharp stick, standing on a poorly rendered CGI wooden dock in the rain, hunting stock footage of a shark in poorly rendered water. He kills the shark with the sharp stick, reaches into the now Halloween mask shark’s mouth, and pulls out a tooth. And as any good father would do, he stuffs it into a county fair softball tossing stuffed animal prize dissimilar enough from Baby Shark not to be copyright infringement and then mails it to his kid. The package arrives at the kid's house, where mom is half a bottle deep into wine o’clock. The kid loves the gift and sleeps with it that night. 


After the opening credits, we’re treated to an outtake of a Zoom call, which has nothing to do with the plot and features no one who appears anywhere in the rest of the movie.  But my favorite part of the entire movie is one of the people on the Zoom call has a VHS copy of Cop Rock behind them. 


The next boy wakes up to find MMom on the couch, curled up and asleep with her wine bottle. She wakes up and now according to the clock in the background, it’s 7:46 in the morning, and mom’s already got another bottle open and her first glass of wine half gone. Alcoholism is hilarious. Also in the background is a high chair at the dining room table; this kid is 8. It’s like it’s not even their house, and they’re just pretending. 

So, mom abandons the kid with a sober babysitter for the weekend while she goes off with her new boyfriend, who suspiciously looks like her father in all the family photos on the end table in the background of the house.  Good for her, though, leaving the kid with an actual responsible adult. 


The neighbor lady tries to seduce the neighbor dude while swimming by removing her swimsuit bottoms, which could have been somewhat hot, but seeing as the water is clear, it’s clearly obvious that she's still wearing another pair of bright red swimbottoms. But it works on him, so he changes into his swimsuit. Which makes no sense if he thinks she is bottomless. 

So this plush shark comes to life intermittently and grows large plastic teeth to kill the neighbors, a dog, and two of the kid's donuts.  When the one police officer who isn’t stock footage questions the babysitter about the neighbors, she tells him that they kept to themselves, made lots of noise, were swingers, and had people over at all hours … all in one contradictory breath. Then he tells the babysitter that he thinks an animal killed them because they butchered, which isn’t a thing animals do. Maul, yes, butchering requires precision, though. 

The babysitter and kid go to the grocery store in the official vehicle of bad movies, the Kia Soul, Which gives a burglar time to break into the house and steals nothing of value, including a half-full bottle of Fabreeze, a cookie cake, some DVD’s, a single pair of bra and panties, and a landline cordless phone - without it’s charging base and DSL filter. Like I’m sure this movie was made in the past few years, given the All Elite Wrestling reference made in the random YouTube video in the middle of the movie, which has nothing to do with the plot and features no one who appears anywhere else on the movie, but what kind of backwater hillbilly town still uses DSL? 


Meanwhile, Dad looks longingly at the photo of his son in his wallet, which is clearly a still from the movie 30 seconds in the future. 

So that dead burglar’s body and gallons of blood just kind of disappear from the house without a trace, and no one even notices that he was ever there, let alone gorily murdered. All the stuff he was stealing magically goes back into its place. 


The babysitter’s friend calls her on a smartphone with the web browser open, not the phone app, and she wants to have a party, so the babysitter drugs the kid’s tomato soup to make him sleep. He passes out, and she puts the kid in his bed and proclaims, “he’ll be out until noon tomorrow!” Meanwhile, it’s still sunny outside, and the giant analog clock behind her says it’s 12:20. This wasn’t a little bit of Nyquill; she put this kid in a goddamn 24-hour coma.  Maybe the drunk mom was actually the more responsible one.


Then the doll shark eats her, so it’s okay. Then, the friend comes over for the party, and when no one answers the door, she breaks in through a window. Then the friend’s boyfriend and his friend show up for the party, and when no one answers the door, they break into, separately but simultaneously using two different doors, the house of the girlfriend’s friend’s employer because why not at this point? They get eaten by the plush shark. Police officer McMullet hears a scream, and now he breaks into the house and gets attacked by the shark, but he has a gun, which slows down the quarter pound of stuffing long enough for him to barricade inside the kid's room. 

“Hey kid, are you okay?” No, dude, he’s not. He’s been very severely drugged. The soft, squishy doll shark somehow breaks down the door, and just when it seems like police business in the front, party in the back hero, and sleeping kid are going to get eaten, Dad appears! (He knocked on the door, and when no one answered, he broke in.) 

Dad has his trusty sharp stick on him, which he brought all the way from his job as a fisherman at the ocean, and quickly dispatches the terrifying toy with one poke. When bullets fail, use a sharpened stick.

The boy then wakes up and hugs Dad while the stunned detective says, “I don’t know how I’m going to write any of this up.” 

I share that sentiment. I have no idea how anyone wrote this crap either.