Jaws in Japan

JAWS IN JAPAN (2009)

BOMB (out of 4)

Miki and Mai are on vacation when they go back to the home of a strange man when even stranger things begin to happen.

JAWS IN JAPAN also goes by the title PSYCHO SHARK but no matter what you call it the film is a complete dud that lacks anything good. Well, let me take that back. Both Nonami Takizawa and Airi Nakajima do a good job in their roles as the annoying girl but everything else is pretty awful from start to finish.

The biggest problem is that nothing here makes too much sense. At times there's weird video footage of the friends, which makes you wonder if it's going for THE RING type of rip-off. There's a shower scene, which I'm guessing is meant towards PSYCHO. Then there's the god-awful looking shark that finally shows up. None of it makes any sense and even worse is the fact that this lasts just 69-minutes.

Be on the look out for the shower sequences where it appears the actresses didn't want to be nude so they re-enact the shower motions with their bathing suits on.

Of any category of low-grade genre fare, I don't know if there's any more consistently dubious than the shark flick. Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws' set a standard that few successors have ever come close to matching, and most filmmakers just don't even bother trying. 'Avalanche sharks,' 'Shark exorcist,' 'Sharknado,' '5-headed shark attack,' 'Sharkansas women's prison massacre,' and countless kindred works do the absolute bare minimum to somehow make a quick buck; add to that list 2009's 'Psycho shark,' also known as 'Jaws in Japan.' It's not that there is no value whatsoever throughout the diminutive length - it's that the value is perfectly negligible, and functionally meaningless, and... You know what, nevermind, just don't ever bother with this tripe. However bad you think it might be, very plainly, it's emphatically worse. I'm genuinely embarrassed to say that I watched.

Flashes of imagery in the first few minutes are intended to excite, so it's too bad that there is no meaning or weight attached to them as they present right off the bat; because of how poorly made this is, additional instances to come are no better. Touches of the music are rather flavorful, but only bits and piece. Between the cinematography and direction some shots are perhaps a tad unconventional, and could have been interesting - if there were any purpose at all to their usage. In theory the actresses are charming, but they are given roles of empty-headed nothing, and it's readily apparent that they were cast not for any acting ability which is never particularly called upon here, but only for their bodies. Given how the female characters are written and how the perpetual Male Gaze visualizes them, it seems that this "movie" was literally developed and executed by twelve year old boys. This would also explain why the "plot" is almost fully devoid of cohesiveness or substance, and why the majority of the runtime is nothing more than footage of scantily-clad young women.

The coastal landscape is nice. There were fractions of slivers of fragments of shades of workable ideas here - which, by the way, have nothing at all to do with sharks. I have no additional praise I could offer, no matter how hard I try. It's true that 'Psycho shark' is one of the very worst things I've ever watched, an exercise in pointless, appalling dreck for which even the mere suggestion of a "bottom of the barrel" rating for quality is several steps too far. Even that is not condemnation enough, though; in watching there is only one other film to come to mind that was this stupefyingly foul and excruciating, and it is something so contemptible that I refuse to even say its name. Because of what fleeting, infinitesimal, ephemeral thoughts did go into this picture, it may in some measure be an indistinguishable degree better than that unnameable abomination. Yet if this is what it takes to summon some nanoscopic iota of assessment that isn't purely withering, then there's really not much point in postulating a distinction, is there?

I don't necessarily mind that the name, promotional material, and scenario are misleading; if a feature is done well, I can definitely get on board with metaphors, hidden meanings, and red herrings. I do mind that this is such putrescent, vacuous, aimless, inconsequential, impotent, fruitless rubbish - the cinematic equivalent of a crash test dummy in a loaded garbage truck that's on fire as it rolls downhill into a sewage treatment plant - that any conceivable earnest value it may have claimed is wholly quashed. Something deserving could have hypothetically been extracted from what 'Psycho shark' ended up being. For that to have happened, however, would have required for every single person involved here to have been replaced with individuals of baseline skill, intelligence, and mental and physiological maturity who cared about what they were making. In our reality, unfortunately, the end result is just rotten, godawful trash that no one should ever watch, and for which all contributors should be continuously castigated and forever blacklisted from cinema and television. Rarely have I so deeply regretted a decision to watch something. You've been warned.

You know how irritating it is, when watching a horror movie, you have to wait an awful long time before something significant or even remotely horrific happens? Tension building is a good thing, but depending on the type of movie you rented, you sometimes just want to see blood and carnage, like it's illustrated on the DVD cover and the stills on the back of the box. Well, "Psycho Shark" brings this sentiment of annoyance to a whole brand new dimension… Please, if you're not familiar with this title, I invite you to perform a search via Google Images and have a good look at the poster image. You will most likely encounter a poster of a shark emerging with wide open jaws, ready to swallow a victim in bikini, as well as stills from a ridiculous over-sized shark practically eating an entire wharf. Looks pretty cool, doesn't it? The painful truth, however, is that all these images are a bunch of shenanigans. "Psycho Shark", or "Jaws in Japan" as it is also known, isn't about raging sharks at all. More than an hour of this already relatively short movie centers on two beautiful and (very) young girls on vacation. The girls have fun and film each other in their too tight bikinis while a sinister young man observes them from a distance. For you see, the shark in the title is probably symbolic as we're dealing with a pervert with a little plastic shark on his key ring. Lame! Until suddenly and completely out of the blue, two minutes before the ending, the worst computer engineered fake shark in the history of bad horror cinema emerges from the water. The few courageous viewers who managed to last this long will be amazed at how awful the digital shark looks. I bet director John Hijiri has a profound explanation about the psychological depth and metaphors hidden in his film, but quite frankly I don't think anyone cares. When people rent a film with a bloodthirsty shark on the cover, they want to see just that!

Just to clarify. The film has a running time of one hour and six minutes, which is set entirely on land. Not an exaggeration, just a fact. This should warn you how little shark action there is. NONE!

This film is based on the false premise that even a bad 'Jaws' rip off is still a 'Jaws' rip off. How hard can it be? All you need is a giant killer shark eating people. Cut, print!

After seeing over 30 sharkxploitation films I know this isn't true. 'Jaws' rip offs can be bad. Really really really bad!!! Like 'Cruel Jaws' or 'The Last Shark.' This one takes the prize.

It's more a rip off of 'Paranormal Inactivity' than it is 'Jaws.' Hence it's really really bad. It's a "found footage" film of girls on vacation filming themselves. So it's not as painful as 'Paranormal Activity' because they're speaking Japanese so the characters are less annoying.

Scary music plays when the girls are either taking a shower or alone in their hotel rooms. Begging the question, who's filming this? Why is scary music playing? The killer isn't Jason, it's a shark. The shark isn't going to break into their hotel room! We know this!

This might actually have made sense of the girls were out on a yacht where the shark could attack them. But chartering a boat would require actual money from the film makers.

The rest of the film is also ON LAND! The first rule of a sharkxploitation film is to get your characters out on the water where they can be eaten! The shark can't come ashore!

The supposed "action" scenes are also on LAND! That's right. They're in three feet of water on the beach when the shark shows up! This isn't scary! They can walk away! A great white can't get you in three feet of water! This isn't scary!

Just to clarify. The film has a running time of one hour and six minutes, which is set entirely on land! Not an exaggeration, just a fact. This should warn you how little action there is.

At least the film does barrow from 'Baywatch's success. Silicone, silicone, and even more silicone! This is exploited for all it's worth with tons of scenes of the girls jumping up and down screaming for help and even a scene where a knife is held by cleavage. Yes, they're all Japanese girls which makes this even funnier.

Don't watch this film!

I don't know about you, but I always enjoy seeing pretty girls on vacation, giggling and posing for the camera in their bikinis. Maybe that's just me, though. Lots of suspense, not much horror, although the evil psycho "shark" is very wicked indeed. And it's a shame the cuties have their vacation spoiled. It just goes to show that if you're going to plan a trip to an exotic local, you really should make reservations and know where it is you are going.

All in all, this movie seemed a lot longer than it was, since nothing much really happened until the very end. And it was odd that those bikini tops never even came off; that might have livened things up a bit.