Notes from the Turkeyground III: A Month in Bad Movie Asylum

Yet again, the annual tradition of watching allegedly 'bad' movies dawned in our household. November 1st is eagerly anticipated like a harvest feast. We stockpile for it all year long. "We can save that movie for the Turkey Challenge!" So we do. It's the Saturnalia, the Carnival season, when all the checks and guards can be dropped and taste is turned on its head. The usual measures of taste, value, and pleasure are no longer so restricted. The gates are open and one never knows what will wander in. Movies that would seem a waste of time in June are, in November, a discovery, a gem, or just a damn good time.

This year, we knew what to kick off with. Those wacky SyFy movies, often produced by The Asylum, that just seem to be getting wackier all the time. There was always a tongue-in-cheek element to those giant shark movies, but they were still playing at being serious. That is, they were still about a giant shark or some other massive terror. I think, as they've come to realize they don't have to play serious, they've gotten better. They've given in to their worst impulses and that kind of perversion is always rewarded in a creative element. The best of these are directed by Griff Furst.

The anaugural film of the challenge this year was Furst's Ghost Shark, a film whose very concept is preposterous enough to amuse. It plays out almost as good as it should. A shark is assaulted by grenade-tossing rednecks, as all good sharks must be, and retreats to a semi-submerged druidic temple to die. The druidic powers that be make the shark not just a ghost, but a ghost that can materialize in any body of water, anywhere, no matter how small or shallow. The shark appears in puddles, cups, sweat, condensation, swimming pools, eating children, teens, more children, and a boardroom executive. This is what we waited all year for, and it was worth it. Thank you, Griff.

Furst also delivered in Arachnoquake, a severely underrated disaster flick about flame-breathing spiders and the all-girls softball team and the drunken tour bus driver that kick their bulbous asses. But he outdid himself with Ragin' Cajun Redneck Gators, where Louisianan yokels are chomped by gators with actual red necks and then themselves transform into angry, you could even say ragin', Cajun redneck gators. Such flagrant disregard for making sense deserves to be seen, however average the result. Hopefully Griff continues in this direction.

Next on the list was similar director, Mark Atkins, whose films are quite a bit more hit-and-miss, but also quite a bit more varied in style. His worst, Alien Origin, is an almost silent film, with a bunch of Filipino non-actors whispering in the jungle and the back of a restaurant with no music or special effects to speak of. His best, The Haunting of Winchester House, is a rehash of the same thing seen many times before, just done better than its larger-budget comparisons. Sand Sharks also deserves mention for its relentless goofiness, thanks largely to Corin Nemec's brilliant portrayal of a massive ahole into which all sharks must flow.

Unfortunately, as a dog that turns to lick its own feces, we returned to David DeCoteau for another try and got more of the same. In 1313: FrankenQueen we found very little Franken and even less Queen. A milfy scientist is supposedly conducting Frankensteinian experiments, but spends 20 minutes straight running a 'probe' (a dollar store flashlight) along one of the buff boys' half-naked body. The boys walk around in a trance a little. Then are merged into a single buff boy who kills her. But 1313: Giant Killer Bees! was totally different, a breath of fresh air, it was--just kidding, it was the same garbage with some bad CGI bees inserted into a few of the frames. DeCoteau's Hansel and Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft, however, was a predictable, but entertaining private school drama with a playful witchcraft element. I'm assuming it was
ghost-directed.

At this point, we decided to return to Griff Furst and see what his earlier career had to offer. Swamp Shark proved a much more average 'ancient shark awakens from the deep and wreaks havoc' film. His take on the Richard Matheson classic, I Am Omega, starring Mark Decascos, was quite a lot of fun. Decascos unleashes his usual martial arts moves on some monstrous non-CGI creatures, hooks up with a city girl, kills some rednecks, and blows stuff up. The more independent film, 30 Days to Die--a title that describes nothing in the film, really--is a combination of serial killer slasher mayhem and women-in-prison flick, with a deranged sheriff running headfirst into a very mismanaged teen girls' juvenile rehabilitation camp, at times very dull and at the same time one of the month's highlights.

The third of our SyFy heroes was Steven Monroe, who provided us with the very entertaining Mongolian Death Worm, which used the wise technique of overstuffing the plot and making good use of its washed-up actor star, Sean Patrick Flannery, as a charming rogue. Monroe's Grave Halloween was a strange Japanese ghost story, set in a spooky forest. Although a great setting, as the only setting the forest provided highly monotonous to the point of sopor.

Unfortunately, not all SyFy directors are created equal. Leigh Scott offered up Flu Bird Horror, in which silly pterodactyls attack teen delinquents in the woods and spread a plague. These plots awkwardly converge with little satisfaction. The Possession of Gail Bowers, starring Griff Furst, was the average possession movie, copying all The Exorcist's moves. The film's vulgarity is what it really has going for it. Finally, Hillside Cannibals, which tries to be deep and anthropologically serious as well as grim and gory while ripping off The Hills Have Eyes ends up being tedious and shrill.

Relief from the SyFy movies came from the UK thanks to Jonathan Glendenning. His S.N.U.B! was a boring mix of Yes Minister without the comedy and unduly slow apocalyptic zombie film. Night Wolf was a little better, hiding the werewolf for far too long and giving us only irritating characters who never get naked. But Strippers vs. Werewolves, a goofy, playful, comic-booky splatter movie with lots of good gore and nudity delivered everything a b-movie ought to deliver and in abundance. Perhaps the most outstanding film of the whole month.

At last, we decided it was time to stop waiting and give Sharknado a try. Can it be as fun as the premise? Can it offer all the pleasures it should? Of course not. The premise is hilarious, but when it comes to stringing it into a plot and real humans, you're stuck taking it too seriously. It's impossible not to take that plot too seriously, as any seriousness is too much. It should only exist as a lost Monty Python skit. At any rate, Sharknado is still fun in its gleeful nonsense, particularly the skydiving climax that so eagerly pisses in Newton's face.

Having watched Sharknado, we had to give director Anthony Ferrante another shot. Hence Hansel and Gretel, a very enjoyable if often wilfully stupid backwoods slasher about a clan of cannibals. Dee Wallace is excellent as the madwoman at the heart of the cannibal mayhem. The Headless Horseman is also a very enjoyable SyFy movie about a backwoods town with an ancient curse. It delivers: a. sinister inbred yokels. b. an ancient curse. c. a malevolent spirit that steals people's heads. d. a pit to hell with little ghostly hands. and e. a sexy hillbilly with pigtails. Sharknado may just be the least of Ferrante's ouevre.

The last of the new directors we met this year was Dennis Devine and hoo boy this fella's a basket case. All of his movies are shot with three ingredients: a bunch of girls from the local college's acting class, a digital camcorder, and Randal Malone. He bakes them not so much to perfection, but to a bizarre, lumpy hodgepodge of catfights, bitchy comments, dark pasts, flashbacks, Agatha Christie style reveals, doughy bodies in bras and bikinis, and cheap stage blood. Yes, every Dennis Devine movie has a large number of cat fights. The most enjoyable part of each of these slashers must be Randal Malone's earnest delivery, used best in Don't Look in the Cellar. Alice in Murderland comes second, thanks to its cat fights, and last and least is Blood Mask, a confusing possession movie with braindead teens, priests, robes, and cheap goth makeup. I'm not sure how I feel about these movies, but I'm glad to have watched them.

Not much time, with all the new friends, to revisit our old buddies. I trekked through Fred Olen Ray's backyard on my own, enjoying my annual treat of Beverly Hills Vamp, and this year Fred's tna classics Evil Toons and Witch Academy. I also paid Steckler a 'What's up, dude?' by rewatching Blood Shack and The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher. But it was really Charles Band my wife and I spent the most time catching up with, enjoying the political incorrectness of Ooga Booga and the mindnumbing pleasures of the latest Evil Bong movie, Wrath of Bong. I'm not sure I know who Charles Band really is. He can make a brainless titty movie like Doll Graveyard, a heady French philosophy-referencing surrealist gem like Blood Dolls, and then a wacked out stoner-flick like Wrath of Bong. He's hard to peg. I just realized this.

I'm glad to say we closed out the year on Wrath of Bong and not the wretched Witchcraft movies we decided to try out. Overall it was a fine month of turkeys, where The Asylum scored a lot more hits than I would have ever imagined. Yet, a month where nothing mindblowingly great was discovered, and a lot of our new company proved little more than fleeting acquaintances. Most of all, I'm glad to have met Griff Furst, a gang of strippers and werewolves, crossed Mongolia with Sean Patrick Flannery as guide, and enjoyed the familiar comforts of Michelle Bauer's bosom and Eddie Deezen's flailing-hand emoting.

Until next year, stay hungry and hold the cranberry sauce.

Two-Headed Shark Attack (2012) - 2/4

“Two heads means twice as many teeth!” is the pithy quip of dialogue that sums up the brilliant idea behind Two-Headed Shark Attack, a new sharksploitation motion picture from The Asylum. The Asylum, a production company infamous for blockbuster rip-offs and intentionally hackneyed plots, is, along with the SyFy network, the champion of increasingly preposterous sea monster movies. Sharktopus may be SyFy’s most absurd film so far; Two-Headed Shark Attack is The Asylum’s, a film so abstracted into self-parodical irony, it’s a metaphor for itself alone.

A highly nebulous pretext about a field-trip is intended to explain why a menagerie of d-cup bikini bimbos and ‘roid-guzzling muscle-heads are on a yacht together. Unfortunately the doubtless highly-educational cruise is interrupted by the central plot, namely the two-headed shark’s attack upon the keel, leaving the motley crew stranded on a sinking atoll.

Duality is the leitmotif governing the Two-Headed Shark Attack narrative. The shark has two heads, so there are two survivors, two humongous hooters on each girl, two boats for douchebags to get eaten in. Starring Charlie O’Connell, the film’s duality cries out for the presence of Jerry O’Connell. Few films have done so since Season 5 of Sliders, but this is one. Instead, Charlie is joined by Carmen Electra, whose purpose in the film is to sunbathe the hell out of the deck. Even the shark’s medium of existence is dual, sometimes CGI and sometimes a huge, rubber head whose teeth bend when the flailing actors touch them.

Before nearly everyone is eaten, we are treated to every form of stupid decision, lesbian kissing, a few unleashed melons, terrible acting, and a total waste of whatever talent Charlie O’Connell can lay claim to as his lightly-grazed leg so debilitates him that he is condemned to foreground reaction shots like shouting, “They’re in danger!” whenever a shark eats someone.

The problem with Two-Headed Shark Attack is that, while two-headed sharks are possible, as are Carmel Electra’s leatherette buttocks, the film’s abstractions take us too far beyond the realms of fun, into the realms of pure this-oughta-be-fun ideas. Nevertheless, the farthest realms of shark possibility have yet to be explored and I hope The Asylum is ready to launch that expedition. J.G. Ballard’s The Shark Exhibition, about a cult of shark-attack survivors exploring the sexual possibilities of shark wounds, rows of disordered teeth in flesh, and the notion of being devoured, needs to be adapted. Salman Rushdie’s Islamasharks, in which Muslims train sharks to destroy the Miss America pageant, is a thoroughly cinematic novel waiting to be filmed. And, last but not least, Jose Saramango’s The Sharking, in which all the world’s bankers suddenly become sharks is the non-too-subtle social commentary The Asylum is ideal to carry out. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Super Shark (2011) - 2.5/4

There's no denying that sharksploitation is the 'sploitation de jour. Most exploitation subgenres take place in previous generations, like the nunsploitation films of the '70s, the blaxsploitation films of the '70s, and the nazisploitation films of the, heh, '70s. Well, the 2000s and 2010s lay claim to sharksploitation. This isn't to say there aren't precurors. Jaws (1975) is, of course, the Black Narcissus of sharksploitation; but there are its ridiculous sequels, films like Deep Blue Sea (1999), and many much cheaper shark movies.

What's interesting about an exploitation subgenre isn't its august precursors or its saturation period--that's the period when the same old narrative is clearly old and tired--but its decadent period, when all creativity is set to scattershot in the hopes something will hit and make the screenplay original. This is the period that gives us the most baroque, bizarre examples of a subgenre. There are only so many times you can have an angry shark attack a beach before it gets boring. But if that shark can take out a commercial jet just by jumping from the sea, it's stupid, but it's not boring.

That's a glorious example of the thoroughly decadent Megashark versus Giant Octopus (2009), a production of the SyFy network. While SyFy films are much derided for their weak CG, washed-up TV actors, and below-average screenplays, the freedom they gave screenwriters to go wild with the CG sharks essentially created sharksploitation as it now stands. How does it now stand? Well, here are some of the titles: Megashark versus Giant Octopus, Megashark versus Crocosaurus (2010), Sharktopus (2010), Shark Night 3D (2011), Swamp Shark (2011), Sand Sharks (2011), of course, Super Shark, and, my personal favourite title, Shark Exorcist (2011).

While the trailer suggests Super Shark is much the same as the SyFy sharksploitation movies, if perhaps a little more tongue-in-cheek, what makes it such a special entry into the subgenre is that it's co-written and directed by Fred Olen Ray, who specialized in over-the-top bizarre horror comedies back in the '80s, making cult classics like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988), Beverly Hills Vamp (1989), and Scalps (1983). Could Super Shark be a return to form? Not quite, but it's quite a bit better than any of the other sharksploitation movies mentioned and is intentionally satirizing the subgenre.

Super Shark concerns a shark released by an oil rig's reckless drilling, a shark with the ability to walk around on its fins and even use them to fly. The oil rig, like a giant metal vagina, was naturally destroyed in the process of giving birth to the supershark, attracting the attention of an anti-oil company crusader who looks pretty good in a bikini. She investigates the water and harasses the CEO over dinner and champagne. Meanwhile, a bikini contest is taking place on the shore and two local lifeguards are competing for the same buff dude. But how will they stop the super shark before he eats all the beach losers?

Well, since Super Shark is a genre send-up, we know it'll have to involve the army and a preposterous solution. As it happens, it does! As even the trailer informs us, "Walking tank for a walking shark!" Indeed. Actually, that Super Shark is a satire is in the very title, which mocks the trend in SyFy movies to make sharks impossibly powerful, as in the aforementioned commercial jet destruction. Of supershark, "That's one big ass shark," we're told. And given the guy who says this hasn't seen the shark, but has only seen what it's done, he'd be right. A shark that can topple an oil rig would have to be thousands of tons heavy. But shark movies don't work that way. Little known fact: sharks can brace themselves against thin air, making it possible to topple oil rigs with sheer muscular force even while leaping in the air. You'd expect the shark to just lift his body up, but no, he pulls the rig down. Physics does not apply in shark movies, of course. And that's part of the joke. But the best joke of all is when the shark starts eating up the melodramatic subplots, a hallmark of SyFy writing. Well-done, supershark!

The best sharksploitation movies are a flurry of witty soundbytes and preposterous shark attack sequences. Super Shark scores many points on both fronts. Most of the soundbytes belong to John Schneider as the oil CEO, whose earnest yet sardonic involvement in the film and/or narrative is just the level of irony needed for this sort of film. It's a very good performance. And the shark appears to be a combination of CG and model, or perhaps it's just unusually good CG for the budget. A damn fine-looking shark. As with any sharksploitation film, the plot tends to drag. Generally this is when the army gets involved and we have to wait for them to try out various weapons on the invincible beast. Fred Olen Ray knows this and tries to toss as much plot down the shark's gullet as possible, keeping the film hustling along far better than other sharksploitation flicks. Nevertheless, there's a fair amount of screenwriting debris that slows the pace. Surely the shark could've eaten another subplot or two? Otherwise, Super Shark is quite an entertaining, low-budget sharksploitation horror comedy.