Crew
Director – Mark Polonia, Screenplay – Bando Glutz, Producer – Rob Hauschild, Photography – Paul Alan Steele, Music – Ghost, Art Direction – Ricky Beamus. Production Company – Polonia Bros. Entertainment.
Cast
Jamie Morgan (Dr Rebecca Sandoval), Jeff Kirkendall (Professor Mountbatten), Tim Hatch (Reed), James Kelly (Tehran), Yolie Canales (Mina), Noyes J. Lawton (Harold Casey)
Plot
Egyptologist Dr Rebecca Sandoval is called to the Pyramids of Giza by Professor Mountbatten, who works on behalf of the US government. In newly uncovered areas beneath the Pyramids, she is shown a sharkophagus – a sarcophagus containing the mummy of an ancient shark god two hundred thousand years old, which is believed to have influenced humanity. These are forced to flee, taking the sharkophagus with them, as cultists break into the tomb. They relocate in hiding, camped in the South American jungles. There the Egyptian cultists conduct incantations to raise the mummy shark Kharis to attack the interlopers and claim one of the group as its bride.
Twin brothers Mark and John Polonia, who hail from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, gained recognition for their ultra-low-budget films, beginning in the 1980s when they were in their teens. John passed away in 2008 but Mark has continued on his own putting out a substantial body of genre works with some hundred films to his name at current count. (A list of the Polonia films is at the bottom of the page).
The killer shark film has become its own entity, taking a turn for the deliberately ridiculous in the 2000s and beyond following the surprise success of Sharknado (2013), which led to a great many imitators. (I have a more detailed listing here with Killer Shark Films). Mark Polonia has made a number of entries in the gonzo killer shark film with Sharkenstein (2016), Land Shark (2017), Shark Encounters of the Third Kind (2020), Noah’s Shark (2021), Virus Shark (2021), Doll Shark (2022), Sharkula (2022), Cocaine Shark (2023) and Camp Blood: Clown Shark (2024), as well as two Jurassic Shark sequels. Mark Polonia had also previously made Sharkenstein and Sharkula, riffing on the Famous Monsters, so you get the impression was that the thinking here was that next on the list should be the mummy. (Shortly after another Z-budget director Bret McCormick/Max Raven chimed in with Dr Jekyll and Mr Shark (2025) to continue the Famous Monsters mash-up).
The plot of Mummy Shark is lunatically random. The sharkophagus is found under the Pyramids and then for some reason the party all relocate to tents in hiding in the South American jungles. The cultists raise the mummy shark to attack. It is discovered that the shark is 200,000 years old and may have shaped humanity – where you are not clear if this is intended as a spoof on Erich von Daniken and
There are all the usual suspects from a Polonia film. The flat and inflectionless Jamie Morgan has been a collaborator since the late 2010s – she is on like her thirtieth Polonia film now. At one point, she writes in her diary “I have difficulty expressing how angry I am” – I hate to tell you, girl, you have difficulty expressing any emotion at all on screen. There is the somewhat more expressive Jeff Kirkendall who has made some seventy films with the Polonias who this time puts on a very fake British accent. Everybody seems to stiff and flat in their reading of their lines – as though they were delivering the script by reading it from off-screen cue cards.
The effects are the usual crappy bottom-of-the-barrel digital effects we get in a Polonia film. The mummy shark itself is a stiff immobile papier-mache puppet loosely wrapped in a muslin bandage that is moved around in front of the camera. There are some really crappy opticals of the pyramid and shark attacking people – not as entirely bad as they get in some Polonia films, but not much better.
The Polonia Brothers films are Hallucinations (1986), the Polonia Brothers, who were then only eighteen years old, went on to make a series of horror films that became legendary for their cheapness. Over the next two decades, the two put out the likes of Splatter Farm (1987), Hellspawn (1993), Saurians (1994), How to Slay a Vampire (1995), Feeders (1996), Night Crawlers (1996), Bad Magic (1998), Terror House (1998), Feeders 2: Slay Bells (1998), Blood Red Planet (2000), The House That Screamed (2000), Hellgate: The House That Screamed 2 (2001), Dweller (2002), Gorilla Warfare: Battle for the Apes (2002), Night Thirst (2002), Holla If I Kill You (2003), Among Us (2004), Dinosaur Chronicles (2004), Peter Rottentail (2004), Preyalien: Alien Predators (2004), Black Mass (2005), Razorteeth (2005), Splatter Beach (2007), Wildcat (2007), Forest Primeval (2008) and Monster Movie (2008). John died of a heart aneurism in 2008. Since then, Mark Polonia has continued on as a solo director, making the likes of HalloweeNight (2009), E.V.E. of Destruction (2011), Empire of the Apes (2013), Camp Blood First Slaughter (2014), Amityville Death House (2015), Channel 13 (2015), Death Reel (2015), Jurassic Prey (2015), Bigfoot vs Zombies (2016), Sharkenstein (2016), Amityville Exorcism (2017), It Kills (2017), Land Shark (2017), Revolt of the Empire of the Apes (2017), Alien Surveillance (2018), BattleBots (2018), Frozen Sasquatch (2018), Ghost of Camp Blood (2018), Bride of the Werewolf (2019), Deadly Playthings (2019), Amityville Island (2020), Children of Camp Blood (2020), Return to Splatter Farm (2020), Shark Encounters of the Third Kind (2020), Camp Murder (2021), Dune World (2021), Invasion of the Empire of the Apes (2021), Noah’s Shark (2021), Sister Krampus (2021), Virus Shark (2021), Amityville in Space (2022), Doll Shark (2022), Feeders 3: The Final Meal (2022), House Squatch (2022), Reel Monsters (2022), Sharkula (2022), Saurians (2022), Cocaine Shark (2023), Jurassic Shark 3: Seavenge (2023), Motorboat (2023), Revenge of the Empire of the Apes (2023), R.I.P. Van Winkle Part 2 (2023), R.I.P. Van Winkle Part 3 (2023), Saurians 2 (2023), Yule Log (2023), Camp Blood: Clown Shark (2024), Cocaine Werewolf (2024), The Girl Wore Yellow Lace (2024), Jurassic Exorcist (2024), The Last Chainsaw Massacre (2024), Once Upon a Time in Amityville (2024), One Million Babes B.C. (2024), Pandasaurus (2024), The Stalking (2024), Teddiscare (2024), Battle Beyond Mars (2025), Cape Cod Cthulhu (2025), The Final Possession (2025), Four Nights in Fear Forest (2025), Harvest of Eyes (2025), Robocidal (2025), Trail Cam Sasquatch (2025), Amityville Rex (2026), Dummy (2026), Shocktopus (2026) and You’re All Doomed (2026).
Trailer here
Full film available here
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