The Five Spot: Do Not Worry, There Is Already A Movie Called 'Cocaine Shark'

Also this week: An Oscars hosting conundrum and a diabolical chip-stealing bird named Steven Seagull

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The whole thing is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go…

FIVE: Gonna have to do better than that, real world

There aren’t many articles out there I will click on faster than ones with headlines like “Brazilian Sharks Test Positive For Cocaine.” There’s just so much going on in there that fires that various sections of my brain. I mean, we’ve got…

• A wild news story to distract me from the serious new stories in the world

• Further fuel for my lifelong distrust of the ocean

• An excuse to shout “DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE COCAINE SHARKS?” at anyone I have cornered into a conversation

• The mental image of a shark stretching its fins out to the sides and saying “THIS IS BRAZIL” like Vin Diesel in Fast Five

• The mental image of two tweaked-out hammerheads sitting around at 2 am excitedly yammering about how they should open a nightclub

• The mental image of a shark kingpin named El Chompo

And so on. I could easily keep going. This story started floating around a week ago and I’ve been thinking about it on and off pretty much ever since. The whole “sharks can’t stop swimming or they’ll die” thing takes on a whole new meaning now. But I digress. As I always do. Digression is pretty much my entire brand at this point.

Here are some of the actual useful bits of information about the cocaine sharks, though, from an article in The Guardian:

Wild sharks off the coast of Brazil have tested positive for cocaine, according to a new study by Brazilian scientists, in the latest research to demonstrate how illegal drug consumption by humans is harming marine life.

See, this is the problem with reading past the headline. There are all these facts in there. Sometimes the facts are good but most of the time they’re like “Oh, right, sharks aren’t supposed to test positive for cocaine.” Kills the whole vibe. The lesson here is to never read. Except for this newsletter. And the ones my friends write. And maybe some books. And this article about how the horses in the Olympics travel on an airplane called Air Horse One. But that’s it. Look at how boring this story gets as you read on.

“Regardless of where the drug came from – which is still not possible to determine – the results show that cocaine is being widely traded and moved in Brazil,” said the study coordinator, Enrico Mendes Saggioro, from the Oswaldo Cruz Institute.

“Cocaine has a low half-life in the environment … so, for us to find it in an animal like this, it means a lot of drugs are entering the biota,” he said.

But anyway, if you are like me, you came away from all of this with two primary thoughts. The first was “Hey, here should be a low-budget science fiction movie called Cocaine Shark.” And then the second was “Wait, I wonder if there already is a low-budget science fiction movie called Cocaine Shark.” And then you, again, like me, punched “cocaine shark movie” into your search engine of choice and discovered this.

There are three things you need to know here…

ONE: The plot of Cocaine Shark reads as follows: “An explosion at a lab lets loose onto the streets an army of mutated, murderous sharks and other creatures injected with a potent new stimulant.”

TWO: As of this writing, the movie, which was released last year and is currently available on Tubi, has a rating of 1.8/10 on IMDb.

THREE: This is an actual screenshot from the trailer…

It’s beautiful. Between this and the Netflix movie about a shark terrorizing the sewers of Paris and various sequels of The Meg, we appear to be in a powerful new era of silly shark movies. Glen Powell will be in one within three years. I know this for certain.

FOUR: There is a surprising amount of incredible badminton commentary out there