Jersey Shore Shark Attack

When a film starts off with "Come in, I won't bite you. Unless you want me to" and goes downhill from there you know you are in trouble.

Total waste of time, from the script (see above) to the special affects (sharks look like kids bathtub play things) , there is nothing good about this movie.

The acting is what you would expect from the TV show, so, umm, not good.

I think it is the first film I have seen in a while that I can think of nothing at all good to say about it.

SyFy channel are known for their cheesiness, they outdid themselves this time.

Unless you are a fan (and even then) avoid.

For reasons more complicated than I would want to explain, I ended up at a special big- screen premiere of "Jersey Shore Shark Attack" last night. The trailer for this TV movie event has been attracting considerable online derision lately, so I feel compelled to say that in a theater, surrounded by a crowd of the willing, it's actually pretty fun.

The cults that surround movies like "The Room" and "Troll 2" have created a weird sort of cottage industry centered around "so-bad-it's-good" entertainment. SyFy, which has lately been churning out deadpan goofs like "Mega-Shark vs. Giant Octopus", seems determined to enter those sweepstakes. But the appeal of something like "The Room" comes from the understanding that the movie was meant to be *good*. (Tommy Wiseau has since claimed otherwise, but seriously, come on.)

"Jersey Shore" and "Mega-Shark", by contrast, are pseudo-hip, self-aware entertainments, somewhere between Roger Corman's '60s beatnik spoof "Bucket of Blood" and a Z-grade Frankie Avalon beach party. Here and there they earn a laugh worthy of a good SCTV sketch. (In "Mega-Shark" it's the bit with the plane, and in this one it's the fate of ex-'N Syncer Joey Fatone.)

This isn't exactly great or even good cinema. On TV, without a live audience, this may well die the death. But low-budget quickies like this used to kill in a drive-in or a 99-cent grindhouse. With low expectations you forgive the clunkier jokes and appreciate the details (like the "Jaws" music cue during Tony Sirico's Quint speech). Fun was had and the profit margins were high-- so why exactly aren't there drive-ins anymore?

I guess I'm being gracious in giving this movie a solid "4." But I'm not ashamed to say that I anxiously waited a week to see "Jersey Shore Shark Attack." As its title would imply, this straight-to-TV SyFy movie, directed by John Shepphird, is a direct, albeit semi-hip and self-knowing, rip-off of "Jaws" (1975) and a hilarious parody of MTV's hit reality TV series "Jersey Shore."

There's a special type of culture for a movie like this, and that is the people who like "movies that are so bad, they're good"; I'm not really in that crowd, just so you know. Yet in a wasteland of bad made-for-TV movies, it is quite possible that this is the best SyFy movie they've ever produced, which unfortunately does not say much about the channel's abysmal track record of weekly "Jaws" rip-offs as a whole.

I love "Jaws," and I'm not afraid to admit to being a viewer of the so-called social "degenerates" on "Jersey Shore"; how many of us truly have our shameless reality TV addictions? We all do. But you have to give the movie credit when it does feature one of the real-live genuine "Jersey Shore" cast members (Vinny Guadagnino) and a former boy band band-mate (Joey Fatone of *NSYNC) in self-knowing cameos as themselves.

A plot summary is pretty useless, but I'll go ahead anyway, in one sentence: During the Fourth of July weekend, prehistoric, deep-sea albino bullsharks are terrorizing Seaside Heights, New Jersey, and it's up to the hard-partying members of a "Jersey Shore"-like reality TV show to stop them. That's it. Although it's unlikely that you could ever count on the drunken beach-goers of Seaside Heights to save the day from man-eating sharks, SyFy is politely asking us to turn our brains off for two hours and enjoy the show.

"Jersey Shore Shark Attack's" merits (incredibly, yes, it does have a few) comes from its knowing self-awareness of its source material. The trick is combining the two sources effectively, and it does so. The movie begins like "Jaws" in its first five minutes, before going on to "Jersey Shore"-like debauchery and shenanigans with Shore-house cast-mate TC/"The Complication" (Jeremy Luc) waking up in bed after a drunken one-night stand with a bikini-clad local floozy, followed by a wet-&-wild wet T-shirt contest at a local bar. Things climax with a bar-room brawl between the Shore-house cast-mates and a group of upper-crust college grads, before comfortably moving back into "Jaws" territory when an ensuing foot-chase between the two conflicting parties down the boardwalk ends with one of the drunken locals becoming shark food.

The CGI special effects are pretty poor, but there are some spectacularly bloody shark attacks that are way more likely to elicit gut-busting laughs than screams. But I don't blame them; it is SyFy, after all.

"Jersey Shore Shark Attack" is a SyFy movie that is better than the rest of the crop of like-minded monster movies the channel is prone to putting out on a weekly basis. The keys to its marginal success are its attempts at combining "Jaws" with the outlandish antics of "Jersey Shore," complete with the requisite gory animal attacks of the former and the bad Italian-American stereotypes (complete with a Snooki-like character delightfully called "Nooki" and a guy with a Pauly D-styled blowout hairdo) of the latter.

Whoever dreamt up the crazy concept for this movie, I'd just like to shake his hand, for he has a cult classic that he can be more or less semi-proud of.

4/10

With a title like this and the fact it was being broadcast on the SyFy Channel I wasn't expecting a film cruelly passed over at the Academy Awards . I was expecting some dumb entertainment with all the rabidly aesthetic appeal of BAYWATCH

To be honest dumb entertainment where you have to switch your brain off is something I did get but the main disappointment is how on earth can a bunch of young women running around in bikinis be so unattractive ? The main bimbo is Nooki ( Stop laughing ) is under the impression that a man is only attracted to a women if she has a bronze skin tone . Let me speak on behalf of 3.5 billion men and state that beauty comes from the inside and not out of a bottle of instant suntan solution . Nooki's suntan is even more distracting and unconvincing than the CGI used in the movie

Dumb shark movies are a dime a dozen (have water, add shark, sprinkle with people in swimwear, and blend) but this one does it superbly well, and adds in some cheesy Jaws elements that I personally enjoyed.