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?
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?