Shark Exorcist [2015]

This movie was utterly inexplicable. I'm not totally sure where to start with this. Obviously the title is wonderful but we've watched a lot of angry fish movies that were ultimately disappointing. This was not one of them probably because the budget didn't allow for anything even remotely competent to happen. Instead you get a bunch of blonde girls in bathing suits who all are dressed and styled like it's 2003 but they have smartphones, one single CGI shark scene that they use multiple times, and a discount nun and priest outfit with a bonus Party City pirate knife. That knife is the only prop in the film, but there's some fake blood and a bit too much green vomit for most people's taste. The whole thing was shot on location in mostly a state park in Tennessee (although they went to Nashville to shoot one scene at the Parthenon). There was clearly very little budget left for editing, sound editing, other CGI, or really anything that could make the film look like anything other than a series of vaguely connected home movies.

As for the plot, we are supposed to believe that:
1. An evil murdering nun kills someone and throws them into a lake as a sacrifice to a "water spirit."
2. This causes a shark (IN A LAKE) to be possessed by a demon with the capacity to possess a person who could then bring them bait in the form of other people.
3. A blonde girl gets possessed by the shark, which makes her really into baths, seafood, and vaguely hitting on girls who might be good shark bait (one of whom seemed to have a developmental delay and it was uncomfortable).
4. A priest is enlisted to help with this demonic shark possession, which results in him sacrificing himself so the shark possess him. He then immediately bites the blonde's ombre friend.
5. In the film's only other CGI shot, ombre friend lures another blonde friend into the water to get eaten by the shark while standing on the dock.
Also, after the credits, there's a series of shots of a girl we've never seen before walking around what appears to be an aquarium gift shop, lovingly petting and cradling the shark plushies. Then she stares intently at a fish tank. This goes on for like seven minutes, and while it was probably the most incomprehensible of the filler scenes, it sure as hell wasn't the only one. I still don't know what was up with the witches in the graveyard, but it was nice to see some characters who didn't dress and style themselves like discount Nicole Ritchies.

Is all that okay with you? It should be. This movie is excellent.

Spoon Rating: 6.5

Kraken: Tentacles Of The Deep [2006]

I'm just going to spoil this whole thing right now: don't watch this. It's really unexciting, the acting is bland instead of funny, and the CGI is not quite bad enough to be enjoyable. The plot is about as simple as you can get too. A perpetually bikini-clad marine archeologist is looking for an opal that has something to do with the Greek myth of Scylla but Kay, resident Greek myth expert, had never even heard of this variant. The archeologist is on a boat with a guy who's hunting the giant beast who killed his parents, an intern, and a traitor who sells them out to some treasure hunters. Intern and traitor die. Archeologist and revenge seeker survive and kill the beast. They don't get the opal, but they get an artifact anyway and make out.

Our lack of joy at this movie can only slightly be attributed to Erik proposing the idea that the treasure hunters are actually a kraken cult, only for us all to not have our dream fulfilled.

Spoon Rating: 1.5

Stalker's Prey [2017]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

For our first Lifetime movie, we have a meeting of two worlds: a shark movie and a stalker movie. This film, "Stalker's Prey," came into our lives on the recommendation of a chorus of Kay's students who have all seen the film. Why has a whole room of high school seniors seen a specific Lifetime movie? It was filmed in their part of the woods, or I should say the sea. The police station is a local community college, a featured restaurant is a place she has actually heard of, and the school's distinct facade is shown with an obvious CGI name change. Although the town is supposed to be Hunter's Grove, they don't even try to change the sign on the back of one person's EMT jacket that says "Niantic."

Putting aside our connection to the film, let's get into the plot. The mumbliest teen in southeastern New England, Laura, gets rescued from a shark attack that left her boyfriend dead in the water. The guy who rescued her is none other than a politician's son who everyone in town immediately reveres. He checks up on Laura a lot and gives her gifts and while nothing seems amiss to Laura's family, the doom music warns the audience that his intentions are not the purest. Although the film seems to try to put forth this idea that he's a catch (fame, looks, volunteering with kids with cancer; also no pun intended), every action he takes seems a little off. He invites Laura to the marina (red flag) to be his date for a campaign fundraiser and suspiciously gives her a dress to wear (how did he know her size?). There's a blackout moment that may imply drunkenness or roofies. He lingers a bit too long with every interaction. 

After that Laura is weary of him but he keeps showing up everywhere: babysitting her sister, subbing at her school, and using the spare key her mom gave him to come inside and watch her sleep. He also starts attacking her friends who she fights with, beating one with a bat and hitting the other with his car. Laura finally decides to investigate his ex and discovers that although he said he talks to her all the time, she's been dead for years. Note: he wasn't lying but Norman Bates-ing it. Laura tries to get him to implicate himself for hitting her friend with his car and he responds by kidnapping her and taking her out on his boat to feed her to the shark he saved her from. They fight. She wins.

Aside from the amusing genre mixture and the ominous music, this movie has some great acting. The actress playing Laura is mostly unintelligible compared to everyone else while the guy playing the stalker is full of the drama. His freak-outs and crazed mutterings stand out as the highlight of the film. More unintentional comedy comes from the bad CGI shark, the car accident scene effect, and other miscellaneous odd choices.

Give it a try, chum.

Quote: "The TV movie writes itself!" [Thanks for the lampshading.]

Spoon Rating: 5.5

The Adventures Of Sharkboy And Lavagirl In 3-D [2005]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

Theoretically, making a decent kid's movie shouldn't be too complicated. Invent some fully developed and funky characters a kid can relate to or look up to and a primary lesson that you want the kids to learn and build a compelling story around that. Maybe, if you have some skill, throw in some subtle winks to the parents in the audience and make the theme universal for all age groups. There's a formula, although as we have often seen, it's apparently not as easy to follow as one might think. And on a last note: don't let your kids come up with the premise if it makes no sense, Robert Rodriguez. 

The plot involves a kid named Max who sees visions, but not really because they're real I guess, of two superkids named Sharkboy and Lavagirl and, reasonably, no one believes him so he gets made fun of. Eventually all his classmates are proven wrong when Sharkboy and Lavagirl burst into the classroom and take him to Planet Drool, a manifestation of his dreams, because they need to save the planet from the bad guy who is also the class bully and his sidekick who is also the teacher. The rest of the movie follows a video game structure with tasks Max must perform to go onto the next task all in gloriously cheap CGI. Ultimately, he's trying to reconcile dreams with reality or something while working through the issues he has with the people in his life. Sharkboy and Lavagirl seem to have their own problems too that are never fully explored. Lavagirl literally has amnesia and Sharkboy has a superiority complex and is played by Taylor Lautner who is quickly becoming a Bad Movie Hall-of-Famer. Throw in a hasty resolution, things being waved in front of the camera (because the original was in 3-D, don't you know), and a pretty obvious "Be Our Guest" ripoff where Lautner sings about dreaming and does gymnastics and you've basically got the whole movie.

Here are some GIFs of the aforementioned song:

And some weird stills:

 I relate.

Kill it with fire.

Casual.

o god stop smiling i feel so unclean

Her response to Sharkboy's dance routine.

I have seen hell.

Quotes:
"The ground is thumping too much."
"My highly trained ears can hear it too."

Shark Night [2011]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

From the director who brought you the second and fourth "Final Destination" movies and "Snakes On A Plane" comes one of the most startlingly uncreative films ever made: "Shark Night." The plot was ripped right out of the dead college student horror movie guidebook. Instead of watching this, you should probably just watch "Cabin In The Woods" and not destroy your evening. 

Seven Tulane University students and their dog set out to one of their summer houses for a few nights of fun. As we have come to understand it they are The Scholar (who is an explicitly stated virgin), The Athlete, The Fool, The Other Fool (we named him Buttflex after his nude intro), The Slut, The Virgin, and The Girl Who Dies Too Soon To Get A Personality But Is Dating The Athlete. First the Athlete gets his arm bitten off off-screen shortly followed by his girlfriend getting devoured by a shark off-screen. It should be noted that the Athlete is black and his girlfriend is Latina. Yes. They went there. The Scholar tries his best to help his unarmed friend to little avail but all seems to be saved when those two rednecks they met at the rest stop show up and offer to help. Instead of calling for help they take the Fool and the Slut out into the water and feed them to the sharks who they apparently control and have rigged up with cameras. Buttflex tries to take the Athlete to help on his own but Athlete commits suicide on the way and Buttflex is eaten by a giant shark head on. This leaves just the Scholar and the Virgin who are separately kidnapped by the rednecks and told of their evil plan: to make shark snuff films for consumers for whom "Shark Week" is too tame. Sharks After Dark, if you will. They are saved by their virgin powers. The dog is also fine.

This movie is so lazy that within just a few minutes we were predicting accurately who would die when and what would happen.The phrase "I hate this" was muttered by everyone in attendance at different points in time. But to say something nice about the movie: it is hilariously meta. The whole scheme of the bad guys is to profit off people's voyeuristic enjoyment of watching people get attacked by sharks . . . which is the exact reason anyone would watch a shark attack movie like this one in the first place. It's like the creators are saying, "We see you, audience, and we're judging you." Well, I'm judging you right back. No amount of meta commentary on human nature could make this movie not the embodiment of boring and conventional mediocrity. 

REWATCH: Zaat [1971]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

Because Keith and Adam's Grandma are in South Carolina this week, we decided to do a rewatch of what actually turned out to be the last movie we watched before I started keeping a Facebook group of the movies we watch: "Zaat." 

The movie is about a mad scientist living in Florida (as all the craziest crazies do) who is obsessed with marine life and trying to facilitate its take over of the world. The first ten minutes or so of the movie is just the scientist in voice-over narration lovingly describing some of the creatures of the deep in a documentary style. Then we watch him go back to his lab and play around with fish and a formula called "ZaAt" that would expedite growth in fish. He uses the formula on himself transforming him into a creature that he describes as, "Nothing at all like the catfish , , , but it's beautiful!" This allows him to check "Self transformation" off his to-do list and he also prematurely checks off "Transform Florida" before he goes out into the water with a spray bottle of Zaat. He gets revenge on the two sane scientists who stalled his research and then tries to kidnap women to made a Lady Zaat and the movie ends on a strangely ambiguous note.

While this may sound like fairly typical horror fair, there's a character to this movie that makes it very unique. Absolutely every shot seems to be in real time and zooms-in seem to be the only camera technique employed. Apparently the studio who facilitated it mostly makes training films. The Zaat costume, with its permanently frozen expression, clearly makes it hard to see as the actor moves slowly and trips a lot. The movie also takes a break to have an acoustic guitar playing hippie sing a song. There's even an attempted chase scene in an amphibious vehicle that goes no where when it hits the water.

It's especially strange how much you want Zaat to succeed. He's almost so pathetic that you want to throw him a bone somehow because he will obviously fail. He may be nothing like the catfish, but he's everything like that loner in high school who didn't have any friends. 

Quote: "You must be tired. So am I. It's been a long 20 years."
[Someone tell Zaat he should sleep at some point.]

Potential Name for a "Bride of Frankenstein"-esque sequel: She's All Zaat

Raging Sharks [2005]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

In honor of the fact that two of the members of the BMN crew happen to be involved in the hospital with the best shark attack floor in the area, let there be MORE SHARK MOVIES! I'm not sure why shark movies are so common for bad movies but Nu Images, the company who did this one (not the Asylum), cites this movie as its six shark movie (one of its previous ones being "Shark Attack 3" starring the wonderful John Barrowman). 

This movie is a lot like one of our previous films, "Deep Blue Sea", but with the addition of aliens who sent down orange crystals that turn the sharks into killers and way less production value. The 'action' takes place mostly on an underwater research base stupidly located in the Bermuda Triangle and run by a man with 90s hair curtains. When he leaves the base to talk about the crazy sharks that are attacking anyone who leaves the base, not Steven Segal from the government says he wants to inspect the place for violations. Meanwhile, Hair Curtains' wife, not Amanda Seyfried (played by Vanessa Angel, which is not a porn star name), tries to keep the base together by repeatedly sending people outside to their doom and being sad when they die. Eventually not Steven Segal gets on the base and goes on a killing spree of the people on it and all the stock footage of sharks attacking is pretty much forgotten. Throw in some operatic stock music, actors who cannot convey outrage to save their lives, a man falling from a plane and bouncing on the water's surface like a klutzy Jesus, and a crew member whose accent encompasses every country in the Anglosphere. The movie appears to go back to its home planet in the end but if you think there's going to be some explanation for why or how any of this occurred, I direct your attention to more ambiguous stock footage.

Best Line: "You have two choices . . . and one of them's wrong!"

Adam's Grandma's Review: "I liked it. It was good."

NEWS: The Future Of Bad Movies

This is really culturally significant.

Also, available at a Barnes & Noble near you.

Deep Blue Sea [1999]

[Originally posted on Facebook on November 19, 2013]

Yesterday, the BMN crew watched "Deep Blue Sea", another addition to our list of "big budget bad movies." If you haven't seen it, you could substitute watching it for watching "Jaws", 'The Poseidon Adventure", "Titanic" and "Sharknado" instead and get the full effect. Of course, this film has Sam Jackson who is definitely tired of these motherfucking sharks on this motherfucking Navy apparatus. The level of unintentional comedy is through the roof and since the collective acting in this movie amounts to maybe one Kevin Costner, you won't care at all when the sharks start destroying people left and right. Also featuring LL Cool J (who's actually trying to act harder than pretty much everyone other than Sammy J) and a rap by LL Cool J about the evil, super smart sharks. It's exactly what you want.

Quote: "I don't like heights, especially falling from them."

Sharknado [2013]

[Originally posted on Facebook on July 30, 2013]

Last night was a double feature of two equally horrible but different movies. First up, we just had to watch "Sharknado" what with everyone including the non-bad-movie-watching crowd checking it out. It's our third Asylum movie (after "Titanic II" and "Mega Piranha") and, as usual, they deliver prime shlock but this time with a premise that isn't just a knockoff and a marketing campaign designed around it being a silly idea (the tagline is "Enou gh said!"). There are parts that really deliver: an opener that never gets called back to, use of a chainsaw, Tara Reid who is now only capable of this sort of movie, the complete betrayal of the laws of physics, and an ending that made ALL of us (except Adam's grandma who was asleep) jump out of our seats and shout, "WHAT?!" Only downside: No title drop.

Quote: "I think we're gonna need a bigger chopper!"