Jersey Shore Shark Attack

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.

The title is an invitation to watch some brain dead clowns get chased by fish with big teeth. Kitschy craziness is promised, and this latest in SyFy channel low budget mutant shark movies delivers enough to make the joke work.

The cast of look-alikes did a great job of spoofing their infamous reality show counterparts. The girl doing Snooki was a dead ringer for her. She and the others had their English-slaying "Joyzee" speech down pat, and the patented stupidity of JS's regulars was a good fit for this type of movie.

Enter the sharks. Like a zillion other movies like this made on the cheap, the sharks are the result of evil corporate America. The special effects were deliberately cheap and fake looking, and are so bad they're funny. Plenty of red dye gets tossed around, but no real grisly scenes, so the comic approach works.

Obviously not to be taken seriously. How can anybody fault sharks or be afraid of them for going after these dummies? If anything, you'll root for the sharks.

Jersey Shore Shark Attack (2012)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

If you're looking for the mastery of Spielberg then it's best that you stay away from this flick but if you're just looking for some cheap entertainment then this here is without question one of the best films that SyFy has done (I know that's not saying too much). The story is pretty simple as the Jersey Shore comes under attack from some albino sharks over the July 4th weekend. JERSEY SHORE SHARK ATTACK works fairly well because the filmmakers were smart enough to realize that they were making a cheap, low-budget movie and it works best because it knows its limitations and instead of pretending to be something it's not, the film instead has fun with its targets. Of course the TV show Jersey Shore is under attack here and throwing in a knock-off of JAWS was just icing on the cake. I've never seen an episode of the television show but it's pretty hard to miss any of its cast members and I thought this movie did a pretty good job at making fun of them. The fighting, drinking, partying and various other things that they do were all spoofed pretty well here and we even get a Snooki wannabe in "Nooki" that is pretty darn funny. The entire spoof aspect of the film works extremely well and a lot of the credit has to go to the cast members who actually turn in good performances. Yes, by doing a spoof that allows the cast to overact and have some fun so that should be taken into credit. I'm not sure if any of them will have long careers but they can at least say they did a nice job here and especially Jeremy Luc as "The Complication" and Melissa Molinaro as Nooki. We even get Paul Sorvino (yes, the GOODFELLAS guy), Vinny Guadagnino and Joey Fatone making cameos. Fred Olen Ray produced this thing so that should tell you all you need to know. We get some pretty gory kills, which will make horror fans happy and we're also given some of the worst CGI effects that help add some laughs. The sharks themselves all look incredibly silly but they too add to the low-budget charm. JERSEY SHORE SHARK ATTACK is far from a masterpiece and it's not even a "good" movie but I give everyone involved credit for knowing what they were doing and at least delivering a fun movie.

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.

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