Jersey Shore Shark Attack – 2012

In 2009, MTV debuted a show called “Jersey Shore”, featuring 9 young Italian-Americans from Seaside Heights, New Jersey.  MTV had a choice, they could have followed the lives of young, intelligent people on their journey out into the world, still full of hopes and dreams, to see what may come.  But no, that’s not entertaining.  Instead, we got a neon orange woman named “Snooki” and a man that refers to himself as “The Situation” getting into bar fights and embarrassing anyone who’s even slightly Italian.

This movie, “Jersey Shore Shark Attack”, follows a very similar group of individuals, including “Nooki” and “The Complication”, in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, one of them will be eaten by a shark.

Don’t pretend like you haven’t daydreamed about it before.

Our story begins with a young Guido/Guidette couple playfully flirting in an industrial construction site.  Instead of going to one of the many, many miles of beach surrounding the area, they choose to unlock a gate, walk through construction, and then jump in the water at the end of the dock.  Luckily, they’re both soon murdered.  They both do the “Huh? I think something touched my leg” act and then get nibbled on a bit before being pulled under for good.  At no point do either of them scream or call for help or even physically thrash around like I would imagine would be instinct.  Nope, just a downward tug of the leg, an unenthusiastic “Huh?”, then a full blown submerging.

As far as I’m concerned, the Sharks are the good guys in this movie.

We’re then introduced to our main characters, all of them slightly modified facsimiles of the cast of Jersey Shore.  We’ve got our main character, “The Complication”, and his friends “Donnie” and “Balzac”.  Then there is The Complication’s love interest, “Nooki”, followed by her two friends, “J-Moni” and “BJ”.  I have to give these actors credit.  They were given a part to play and completely nailed it.  I hate Nooki about as much as I hate the real thing.  Every single one of them are smug fucks and I want to punch them.  But, that’s acting.  No matter how bad the movie might be, I have to give credit where credit is due.  Most impressive of all is actor Daniel Booko’s ability to maintain a permanent Duckface throughout the entire movie.

The movie followed the basic “shark attack movie” formula, where a few random people get picked off by the sharks, some random person puts the clues together and tries to warn everyone but the townsfolk don’t believe him until it’s too late.  Standard stuff.

We start out by losing “JP the midget” (not an actual midget) and a guy named Vinny, to the sharks.  No one cares except our main characters.  Then, while in town on a mistakenly booked tour, the actual Joey Fatone gets eaten by a giant albino shark that has jumped out of the water, over the Jersey Pier.

Spoiler: he doesn’t make it.

Our heroes go on a journey to try and find out why these sharks are attacking and how to stop them.  We find out that the evil Dolan Corporation is drilling just offshore, which is causing large vibrations that piss off these giant albino sharks.  We find out that the rich, snobby kids are assholes but can take a punch like a man.  And we also find out that everyone, I mean everyone, in New Jersey is racist towards Italians.

After their journey of self-discovery, the gang bands together on a boat filled with assault rifles and shotguns, and everyone just starts shooting into the shark infested waters.  They never appear to hit anything but the dorsal fin, but that’s apparently all it takes to kill a shark.  As a minor note, the way everyone fired their gun really bothered me.  Every time a pistol or shotgun was fired, the gun would fly up over their head like they were a cartoon character.

After the sharks ram themselves headfirst into the Jersey Pier enough to cause it to collapse halfway into the ocean, someone finally gets the idea to turn off the giant drill that’s been attracting all the sharks in the first place.  And then, as if someone literally just flipped a switch (because they did), the sharks turn around and leave.  That’s it.  The drill turns off, and the sharks just say “Oh well” and go home.

There was one scene that got a genuine laugh out of me.  At one point, a man on the beach is trying to impress a girl by pulling his shirt up and saying “look at this 8 pack, baby. go ahead, count ‘em.” only for a shark to jump out of the water, bite his torso off, and wriggle back into the ocean.

The sharks themselves were questionable at times.  They switched back and forth between a giant foam shark prop, and CG animated sharks.  My personal favorite was the “sock-puppet” sharks that came up to the side of the boat during the shootout at the end of the movie.  Damn thing looked like an oven mitt with teeth.

Also, I should point out that there were actual actors in this movie.  Tony Sirico from The Sopranos plays a bar-owner named Captian Savile.  Paul Sorvino plays Mayor Palantine, the corrupt city official that allowed the deep sea drilling in the first place.  And there’s also William Atherton, who I immediately recognized from Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie.  You’ll most likely recognize Joey Fatone, but I don’t count him as an actor.  I assume that some kind of mob debt is in play here for these actors to willingly be a part of this film.  All of them being Italian doesn’t do anything to refute this theory.

I’m a little torn on this movie.  I love hating on movies that take themselves seriously and don’t realize how awful they are, but this movie doesn’t fall into that category.  This movie puts itself out there almost as if it knows it’s a parody of itself.  Will people remember who Snooki was in 10 years?  Probably not.  But at least we got to poke fun at her while it lasted.

This isn’t a great movie, but it’s entertaining as long as you don’t expect too much from it.  Grab some drinks and some friends and check out Jersey Shore Shark Attack while you fantasize about Snooki actually getting eaten by sharks. This movie can be found for pretty cheap at Walmart, I think I got a copy of it for about $7.

Also, for the record, I’m about 85% sure that “Guido” isn’t racist.

Part of me wishes this movie were worse, so I could make some kind of “Hurricane Sandy was god’s punishment for Jersey Shore Shark Attack” joke.  But it wasn’t, so I won’t.  I’m classier than that.