SH*T SH*W REV*EWS

James subjects himself to the worse things he can find to tell you what is worth buying and inviting your friends over to watch.

SH*T SH*W REV*EW: Sand Sharks

This whole idea to review movies like these began with our DVD Releases segment on the podcast. Each week when I went through what was coming out that next Tuesday I always scrolled to the bottom to see what things nobody cared about, and what I noticed what just how many shark movies get tossed to the bottom of bargain bins each year. It sometimes felt like there was one every week. But when I saw the cover of Sand Sharks I knew I needed to see it. And when Ryan texted me and said Sand Sharks was on Netflix, I dropped what I was doing and started wasting my time. After that I knew I needed to start doing this blog series, so it’s only fair that Sand Sharks get its own entry.
 
Entrepreneur Jimmy Green has borrowed money from the mob to fund a Spring Break Party on the island that he called home growing up only to find that the beach where he wants to party is infested with a brood of young sharks specially adapted to swim through the sand like it was water. Jimmy struggles to navigate the treacherous sands berween against his ex-girlfriend and her brother—sheriffs of the island—the mayor, a woman from the mob sent to protect their investment, and the deadly sand sharks. People get eaten, there’s dancing, and a guy named Angus fires a flamethrower fueled with napalm.
 
“Are you serious right now?” “As a heart attack… or a shark attack.”
 
Sand Sharks gains points for having built in the makings of a drinking game. It appears that once the script was finished it was given to to another writer whose assignment was simply to work in as many shark puns as possible. Everything ‘bites’, every argument ends with someone saying they had their head bitten off, and beach parties are ‘to die for.’ Some of the puns are awkwardly forced into phrases that don’t even make sense, like ‘you really are a shark-tongued devil’ or ‘we’re kinda stuck between a rock and a shark place.’ These lines are so ridiculous that the only thing that could make them better is if each one were accompanied by a shot.

“You know that this isn’t a party that ends at midnight, it’s you life!”
 
If I thought Brooke Hogan was brilliantly bad in 2-Headed Shark Attack that is only because I didn’t realize how under-utilized she was in that movie. Here she plays Sandy Powers, the daughter of some  kind of super shark scientist who was killed by sharks since the last time that this island called him for help with a shark attack. What’s great about her in this movie is that she spends sixty-percent of her dialogue talking about how she needs to do more tests, “carbon dating, DNA, stuff like that.” I don’t know how a DNA test is going to tell her anything about the shark, but she sure does talk about DNA tests often and apparently it reveals how the sharks scales turn into suction cups and grip each grain of sand while also drawing moisture from them… or something important like that.
 
There are some genuinely fun things about this movie. I really mean that. Jimmy Green is ham-fisted and silly but there is something about Corin Nemec’s performance that is just the right level of over the top. When Jimmy goes to the pier to get everyone to evacuate and he sees two kids—who, by the way, watched a girl get eaten only minutes ago but somehow don’t know that they aren’t safe on the beach—and he screams to get them to run away. The scene is clearly improvised and they allow it to go on so long that when he finally says, “Oh my God, you guys are idiots” it’s genuinely funny. The character is stupid and corny and cliché but there are times when all that is in balance and you’ll actually smile a little at stupid lines of dialogue. Jimmy also finds ways to be distracting the the background of scenes, just acting goofy and drawing attention away from everything else that’s just a normal kind of stupid. I’m not saying I want to see a sequel with this guy in it… I’m just trying my best to say something good about the movie.

The last great character that graces us with his presence is Angus, the shameful replication of Quint from Jaws. He first shows up at the town meeting, just like the actual Quint, and gives a speech about how much he knows about the sharks and that he can catch and kill them, “hook, line, and sinker”—which is completely the wrong idiom for the situation but he just keeps saying it. Maybe the most creative line in the movie is when Angus shows up at the end to usher us into the third act, shouting about killer sharks, and the sheriff asks, “Are you ever seen before you’re heard?” It’s a funny little commentary on that kind of scene transition.
 
I’ve said too many good things about this movie, you’re going to start thinking that it isn’t any fun to watch. This movie is full of dumb. One of the guys who works for Jimmy says he can “crash the internet” and when he tries to prove it he causes the lights in the room to flicker. Right after watching someone get eaten, Jimmy’s dad walks out onto the beach and starts yelling about how he’s tired of all these sharks and that he’s “drawing a line in the sand” and then of course he gets eaten and Jimmy is very sad. The ex-girlfriend cop gets bitten in half yet survives long enough to call Jimmy a jerk as he tries to push her guts back together to keep her alive. This is one of those moments when his ridiculousness is in perfect balance. At that same time the Sheriff and Dr. Sandy Powers are stuck on a rock in the middle of the beach and when Jimmy tells them on the walkie that his sister was bitten in half the Sheriff goes off on Jimmy only to forgive him seconds later. Don’t worry about them by the way, the next time they are needed they will simply show up and when asked how they got off the rock they’ll explain that they “got away.” Did I mention that one of the reasons that the town is hesitant to let Jimmy throw the party is that the last time he did this fifteen people died. They never say what they died from, clearly it wasn’t sand sharks, so I assume that it was just that they partied so hard that they died from over-exposure to partying. Speaking of which once the party starts there are only about thirty people there and the stage is less impressive than a cheap booth at a second rate convention. If something that insignificant can boost the island’s economy like Jimmy promises it will I think they might be better off setting up a lemonade stand, provided they can borrow the pitcher from their parents.

The sharks here are particularly bad. They hardly look like sharks by the way they are designed which only makes the CG stand out even more. Most of the time the sharks are simply seen as fins in the sand, which at least leave a trail wherever they go, but that means the only actual animation is when the sharks jump out of the sand and beach themselves to eat someone. The most we actually see the sharks move is at the end when the really big one—big enough that its dorsal fin is popping out of the top of the nearby ridge—pops up inside of the shack, suddenly much smaller, and wiggles its head back and forth… menacingly! Then Brooke Hogan throws a jar of napalm in its mouth and it explodes.
 
“Eat this you sand of a bitch!”
 
The most jarringly bad part of the movie is the end. They try to draw the sharks to a part of the beach where there is a shack they can hide in while they shoot the sharks with napalm (as I’ve noted before, it’s always fire). But the place where they film the shack and the place where the sharks congregate are clearly two different places filmed as if we wont notice. In a final moment of heroism, Jimmy runs out and attracts the sharks to him by singing Row Row Row Your Boat and then letting them eat him.

“Until then your party isn’t on the sand… it’s on the ice.”
 
And the final score is: 4 out of 5. This movie is really bad in many great ways. From the bad puns and the worse creature effects to the languid set-up for anti-climactic nudity and violence, Sand Sharks is actually pretty funny to watch. Some of the acting and writing manages to actually be palatable enough that it makes the down time between shark attacks watchable. All this would probably only get it a 3 normally but since the points don’t really matter I’m giving it a boost for being on Netflix Instant and being a movie that you could drink to, though honestly if you did a shot every time they made a shark pun you might put yourself in danger. So Have FUN!
 
SH*T SH*W REV*EW will return with Transmorphers 2: Fall of Man 
It won this honor by using modem sounds in the trailer.
– James Hart
Have a bad movie you think I might love. Leave it in the comments below.

SH*T SH*W REV*EW: Pinata: Survival Island

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When I decided to start writing these reviews of the film world’s version of ‘shovel-wear’, starting with Two-Headed Shark Attack a few weeks ago, the first film I put on my ever-expanding list of potentials was Piňata: Survival Island. I’ve seen Piňata about half a dozen times in my life because there was a spring break during college when it was on late night tv every night… so what else was I going to do but watch it. Now I’m a proud owner.

“Oh, scary… Let’s open you up there, big guy.”

Piňata: Survival Island starts with a convoluted origin of an evil Piňata. Joaquim de Almeida narrates the story of a magical shaman in an ancient village who builds a clay Piňata to house all the sins of the villagers. Note: If this sounds like something you’d be interested in attempting, the movie gives you exact instructions about what pig parts should be used and how, as well as the construction of a good-luck Piňata, and the details of performing the required ritual. Educational attributes will not affect the film’s final score. The Piňata is then set adrift in the ocean where it gets struck by lightning, which… probably… gives it powers or something. Where might the Piňata run aground??

We join our party of boating college students on their way to an island to celebrate Cinco de Mayo by doing an underwear scavenger hunt put on by the greek community at their college. The frat brothers and sorority sisters are handcuffed in pairs and sent out onto the island to gather undies. Kyle (Nicholas Brendon) and Tina (Jaime Pressly) just went through a breakup but they end up handcuffed together, which would be the worst of their problems if a pair of loopy pot-smokers didn’t come across a clay demon statue and try to break it open, hoping that it’s filled with underwear. Then people die!

“And when we cracked it, we heard a sound like we were letting out the pain and suffering of an entire village. I had no idea how to describe it until you just put it into words. We thought it was because we were high but that is exactly what it sounded like.”

The best things about this movie are tied into that ridiculous premise. I don’t know what the actual origins of the modern, candy-filled piňata are, but if I found a clay demon statue on an island I wouldn’t immediately call it a piňata. Any time the piňata is on screen its comedy gold without hardly doing anything. It spends most of its time walking around the jungle watching people harvest underwear, we spend plenty of time watching close-ups of its footsteps and repeated animations of the demon walking, or eventually flying—because eating souls causes it to evolve—and when it does descend upon our victims it usually just bashes their heads in with a shovel. He does rip one guys heart out and tries to kill another with his magical boomerang club, but that’s as creative as it gets. It’s clear that they use a guy in a suit for most of the shots where we see the whole creature, but they have a more articulate head that they use for extreme close ups, and the attacks are mostly done by a CG entity. The worst thing about this is that because the guy in a suit can’t articulate his face it seems they resorted to just distorting the image to make it look like the creature has some life. As the movie moves forward they rely on this idea that the piňata can change, using an entirely CG version instead, and eventually teaching it to fly so that they can save on animation.

As you expect we get some pretty ridiculous scenes. While running away from the piňata, one woman feels it is necessary to slowly walk along a fallen long rather than simply jump over it, allowing her to dramatically fall over in slow-motion. Nicholas Brenden has a scene where he retells the entire opening origin story from memory, I guess because he studied Megonyo history in college. There is an ominous chapter break that decides we need to know that it is now May 6th. Maybe my favorite thing about this movie is how much the piňata loves trees and vines but can’t use them. It ties a noose around its neck twice, once to lure in victims who think it is a normal piňata, and again later to swing from the trees, turn one hand into a knife and cut a girl’s head off while her friend pees nearby. It even strings a guy up with fake looking hobby store vines while he stops to get a rock out of his shoe.

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No SH*T SH*W is really complete without seeing through the monster’s eyes. Here we get Piňata Vision!

“Time for us to stop being hunted and start doing the hunting.”

Like any other movie that doesn’t leave a way out for its characters, they resort to makeshift explosives to defeat the piňata. There is really no mention of a plan until the other remaining survivors start telling Kyle that they hope his plan works. Preparation involves a montage and an intense gas siphoning sequence, later followed up with a swinging kick and an equally intense gas pouring sequence. It turns out all they have to do is handcuff a molotov cocktail to the piňata’shead and it’ll explode. Then campus police show up and ask them what happened.

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“Someone, or something, is out there and it’s majorly fucked up.”

What’s not good about this movie might surprise you, it’s the acting… it’s too good. The parts of this movie that don’t involve the piňata demon are too serviceable. Movies like this are more fun when the dialogue is cringe-worthy and poorly delivered. Nicholas Brendon, Jaime Pressly, and the rest of the actors do their best to channel performances from a mid-nineties sitcom, which really takes the edge off of the majority of the scenes without the piňata. If this were really just a movie about an island possessed by a demon, if you removed all the piňata context, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun.

I’m disappointed to say that I’m giving this movie a 3. I remembered it being much worse, and therefore much more fun to watch. But for as stupid as the premise is, most of the scenes are borderline watchable and there is too much time between the stupid sequences. If you had your friends over to watch Piňata: Survival Island, you would be doing it for the sake of saying you’d seen a movie about a killer piňata, not because you want to.

Oh, and GOOD NEWS EVERYONE! In my research I found that the entire film is on Youtube… so… if you feel like it:

– James Hart

SH*T SH*W REV*EW will return with another Brooke Hogan joint, Sand Sharks

Have you seen Piňata: Survival Island? Tell us what you think about it below!

SH*T SH*W REV*EW: 2-Headed Shark Attack

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I’m really not sure how to reconcile what I’m about to do. Our motto this past year has been “Want to like the movie” because I truly believe that cynicism is becoming far to prevalent in the film criticism world, it’s become too popular to hate things that other people like or that are just trying to be fun because it makes the critic look smart. But I’m starting a series here that I’ll return to throughout the year where I’m gonna hate on stuff. But not just any stuff, this stuff is real, genuine shit that no one has delusions about being good—except, it appears, maybe Brooke Hogan. If you’ve been listening to the show, you know that I love torturing myself with really bad films, and I love the idea of bad shark movies with low budgets and silly premises, but I haven’t seen enough of them. So I’m about to get educated.

2-Head Shark Attack

“It’s got two heads.” 

“Two Heads is twice as many Teeth!”

You know what’s scarier than a two-headed shark? Two sharks.

2-Headed Shark Attack drops a boat full of students who are studying… sextants?… into the waters around an unstable atoll where a mutated shark with two heads has been eating water-skiers two at a time. When they come upon the carcass of a large shark that the shark-and-a-half has killed, they accidentally guide it into their propeller, punching a slow leak in the hull, and they are forced to evacuate to the atoll. This is the point where you look up the definition of an atoll, since this one is apparently sinking because the two-headed shark keeps running into the corral supporting it. As they plunder the island for “scrap metal” to fix the boat they find plenty of reasons to motor back and forth between the atoll and the ship so that the shark has more opportunities to pick them off.

There are “good” things about 2-Headed Shark Attack. Hmm… no, let’s try again.

There “are” “good” “things” about 2-Headed Shark Attack. Better.

imageThe two heads of the shark have pronounced jowls that are either an homage to the design of Bruce from Jaws or evidence that the makers of 2-Headed Shark Attack don’t know what sharks actually look like, so they just re-watched Jaws and modeled the shark heads after that. Note: I just realized how much better this movie would have been if one of the shark heads had an eyepatch and the other one had some missing teeth or a beard, so that they were individualized like a two-headed ogre. The other “good” “thing” about the CG is that it is sometimes actually unique to the scene taking place. What I mean is that in most Asylum movies they simply create a few CG animations for their creature and then reuse them, so that the monsters never actually feel like they are interacting with the scene. In 2-Headed Shark Attack they still reuse plenty of footage but they also have a sequence where the shark attacks a guy and throws him up in the air and slaps him with its 1-tail, and another shot where they attack someone and the two heads pull the victim apart underwater like the T-Rex’s (T-Rexi?) in The Lost World. It’s not particularly convincing, but it’s evidence that anyone tried. Part of the fun of the idea of a two-headed shark is what interesting ways it might kill someone, or that while the shark is eating someone you still aren’t safe, and at least 2-Headed Shark Attack “tries” to fulfill on that promise.

“The boat just needed a little tuning up. Now we just need gas.”

“We just found this gas can.”

“Is there anything in it?”

“It smells like gas.”

Asylum films are fairly desperate, but I’ve never seen them moving in the direction of straight to DVD American Pie films that make them money on teenagers who want to rent films full of nudity, until now. 2-Headed shark attack isn’t full of nudity, but it wants to be. I’ve never seen a director so excited to have Carmen Electra in their movie since Baywatch: White Thunder at Glacier Bay. There are a bizarre, if not creepy, number of shots of Electra laying on the deck of the ship in a bikini, zooming in and out like the eyes of a lusty animated wolf. Nine out of ten of the students are busty women who, if they aren’t wearing a bikini are either made fun of for their one-pieces, or are wearing a shirt that they later take off in order to cover one of the men’s wounds. Every minor occurrence is followed by multiple reaction shots of bikini clad ladies screaming or running. Especially if the law suits against Asylum continue, then in three years these movies will have titles like Shark Attack in the Grotto or Busty Beauties get Hammer-Head.

“Once this atoll sinks, we will be.”

If you’re like me and you love these bad movies, there are plenty of funny scenes to appease you. The excruciatingly long topless makeout sequence ends with both the fine young ladies attacked by the shark-and-a-half. The shark doesn’t eat them though, it apparently has some kind of power to cause them to spasm and cough up blood before falling over in waist high water. Considering the depth of the water the shark can use this power from at least thirty-five feet away. As can usually be expected there is plenty of disembodied dialogue, clearly added in post, but what’s great about it here is usually that kind of ADR is to clarify clunky plot points, like someone yelling “it’s being drawn towards the electro-magnetic pulse of the welder,” but there are also some lines that are clearly added and just as clearly unnecessary. And that’s another thing, there is a whole subplot about the shark being drawn to vibrations, but sometimes it’s electro-magnetic pulses, and in the end they just draw it in with blood… so none of that matters. Their final plan to kill the shark-and-a-half is to feed the shark a barrel of oil with a lit fuse in it… but the fuse is a guy’s shirt… which is soaked… and they actually say that they’ll wring it out… which wont do much good since while they try to light it the fuse the shirt is still floating in the water… and then they are surprised when it doesn’t work.

“I think it’s a Jellyfish.”

I genuinely think that Brooke Hogan thinks she is breaking in with these films. I think that she expects someone to see her irritable delivery of lines like, “fears don’t get over themselves” and hire her to be in their movies. I hope that doesn’t happen though, because I need her to return for 2-Headed Sand-Shark Attack.

I’m going to rate these movies on a scale from 1 to 5 based on how much fun they would be for you and your friends to watch drunk. 5 being something genuinely good but still crazy and knowingly tongue-in-cheek like Stephen Sommer’s Deep Rising, and 1 being a movie that is bad, but boring, like Dragonheart 2: More Dragons, or whatever that movie was called.

image2-Headed Shark attack gets an un-ironic 2. If the scenes didn’t feel like they dragged on so long and the attacks weren’t always preceded by what feels like eons of the shark’s approach then the movie might be higher. The acting is horrible, sure, but the real gem here is how deranged the plot-points are. This isn’t a bad movie to put on in the background while your friends are over, but it’s one you’ll find yourself drawing everyone’s attention to during the best-bad parts and then ignoring the rest of the time.

– James Hart

SH*T SH*W REV*EW will return with Pinata: Survival Island.

Seen 2-Headed Shark Attack? Tell me why in the comments below!

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