A horrifying entertainment that fully assumes its comic side, “Blue Scare” is marked by several joyful kills. Blasé by his endless monologue, Samuel L. Jackson has also campaigned for the memorable fate that the film has in store for him.
Scared : the sharks take control
After the mountain trap (Cliffhanger: Stalking to the top) and the airport trap (58 minutes to live), Renny Harlin embarks on the trap on the high seas. With Scaredthe director tries out a genre popularized by Steven Spielberg with Jaws and today exhausted by the saga Sharknado : the movie of sharks.
Released in 2000 in France, the feature film traps the characters and the viewer in Aquatica, an underwater research center. Within this isolated complex, researchers led by Susan McCallister (Saffron Burrows) and Jim Whitlock (Stellan Skarsgård) are trying to develop a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. To do this, they perform genetic manipulations on the brains of several sharks. Manipulations that logically end up making the poor beasts angry…
Eager to regain their freedom, the sharks carry out a real carnage, setting the structure on fire and blood. At the heart of this underwater hell, a small group of survivors do their utmost to get to the surface. LL Cool J, Thomas Jane, Jacqueline McKenzie, Michael Rapaport and Samuel L. Jackson complete the cast of this horrific spectacle with dated digital effects, but which has fully aware of its comic potential and offers several generous deaths.
Un ultime monologue interminable
Among the most memorable deaths of Scared feature the moment when a shark uses the stretcher on which an important character is installed to break a window and enter the complex, and especially the sudden disappearance of Samuel L. Jackson. For his reunion with the latter following the fabulous Goodbye foreverRenny Harlin would have initially offered him the role of Sherman Dudley, the cook of the platform played by LL Cool J.
The actor refuses and the investor Russell Franklin is specially created for him according to Screenrant. If he dies wildly following the first hour, this individual is initially billed as the film’s protagonist, able to survive the disaster as he has already survived a disastrous experience in the Alps. Alas, it is not.
As he embarks on a telephone monologue on the need to unite to stay alive, Russell Franklin is suddenly bitten by a shark on patrol. In 2019, the site Befores & After looks back on this unforgettable sequence of Scared with special effects supervisor Jeff Okun. This reveals that the speech was originally seven pages long and contained “the worst dialogues you’ve never heard”. Very quickly, Samuel L. Jackson realizes the poor quality of his last speech and launches to the director:
Renny, have you read it? I don’t mean that.
Samuel L. Jackson’s “favorite death”
Subsequently, Renny Harlin fails to convince the star to go following his tirade. After the complicated filming of the scene, Jeff Okun lets Samuel L. Jackson know that he is totally possible to kill him earlier and shorten his logorrhea. The actor then responds:
Yeah, I’m not satisfied. Just kill me. The sooner you kill me, the happier I will be.
But before that, the special effects supervisor and the studio must persuade the director that his horror film is to be taken at face value, and that the unexpected disappearance of Russell Franklin might accentuate the comic tone. On arrival, they are right to insist since this death probably remains one of the best passages of the feature film and enchants Samuel L. Jackson, who says regarding it:
(It is the best. Dead. All time. It’s my favorite death.
