Jersey Shore Shark Attack

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?

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.

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

Many years ago, hundreds of locals and tourists were massacred by giant man-eating sharks in the infamous 1916 Jersey Shore attacks. But that was just a legend... or is it?

I love how the cover quote says this film is better than "The Avengers". Either that guy was paid a lot of money, was on some really good prescription medication, or was willing to sell his soul and lie just to get his name on the cover of a DVD.

I also love how the producer and second unit director is Fred Olen Ray, pretty much the modern master of the B movie. This film does not have Ray's style to it, though, so I am a bit curious which parts were second unit.

Sadly, I must confess that overall this was not a terrible movie. While more comedy than horror, they really pulled all the stops in capturing the "Jersey Shore" feel with muscles, guidos, and fake tans. The actors chosen were excellent for their respective parts, and even a few bigger names -- Paul Sorvino, Joey Fatone -- made appearances. I am a bit impressed.

Great film? No. But actually somewhat better than much of what the SyFy network produces.

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.