Badmovies.org Forum

No, not the green ghost from Ghostbusters. This is a novel written by John Brosnan and Leroy Kettle under the pseudonym "Harry Adam Knight."

(http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/slimer_5701.jpg)

A group of British drug smugglers (and one American guy) are doing a dope run when their yacht sinks due to a slight case of explosion. They drift in a life raft for several days before stumbling across an oil rig owned by an American company called Brinkstone. Inside, they find a secret lab filled with high-tech genetic engineering equipment. There's no people, though. There are a lot of empty clothes and abandoned weapons, however...

A little detective work on the part of main character Paul, the most levelheaded member of the group (for a drug dealer, anyway) reveals that Brinkstone was engaged in something they called the Phoenix Project. Their goal was to create a life form which could survive under any conditions. Unfortunately for them, it seems they succeeded. Their test subject was a great white shark the scientists nicknamed "Charlie." Well, now Charlie is intelligent, bipedal and capable of shapeshifting and absorbing the minds and memories of anyone he consumes. And worse yet, he's still aboard the rig...

Making things even more difficult is the fact the group's lone American member, Alex, is a confrontational jackass and a rapist, who is constantly challenging Paul for leadership, and whose behavior is getting worse and worse the longer the group remains in confined quarters together.

Not a classic by any means, but definitely a page turner. And who can say no to an intelligent shapeshifting shark?  :bouncegiggle:

It was adapted into a fairly watchable movie called Proteus, with the script penned by Brosnan himself. For some reason, though, he made Alex British and everyone else American, and also made Alex the good guy and gave his jerkass qualities to Paul. Go figure.

As you described the book I was thinking "this sounds like Proteus. At the very end you confirm the film's origins.

I have been waiting to get a copy of Proteus for a while. I don't think it has been released on DVD yet.

Yeah. I read the novel first, then saw Proteus, and was pretty impressed at how faithful it was (Brosnan's switching the characters' names, personalities and nationalities around for no good reason notwithstanding), and I also loved Craig Fairbrass in the lead role. He was a likable enough guy (the polar opposite of his henchman character in Cliffhanger). And all things considered, Proteus was definitely better than the abysmal Carnosaur, the previous attempt at adapting one of the author's books, which utterly butchered it. Yeah, I know, it's not classic literature, but I think it still deserved to be treated better!

As to Proteus' availability, it's on Netflix. My sister's boyfriend and I managed to find it by chance.