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.

Porkchop (2010) - 2/4

A large budget and good production values aren't really needed to make a fun film. Just a supple imagination. What's sad about Porkchop is that it begins so imaginatively and ends so banally. The first two thirds of Porkchop are almost a whole other film, a bizarre teenage sex comedy in which a stereotype nerd, a British punk, and a robot (voiced by Evil Dead II's Dan Hicks) all try to get some from a cheerleader and a post-punk lolita, while their more normal friend plays his girlfriend (Ruby Larocca) and the cheerleader.

This rogues gallery heads out for a camping trip, the journey to which makes up the comedy portion of the film. This part of the film is very good. While the acting and caricaturizations are all over-the-top, the characters are funny, the dialogue is witty--often so much so it's quite surprising--and delivered just as it should be. Knowing this film to be a horror film about a pig-headed killer, of course, meant I was in wait for the backwoods slasher action to greet the oddball characters. And that seemed very promising to me. Played as a horror comedy, so much could be done in the same absurd style that characterized most of the film. I imagined the epic battle that might ensue between pigman and robot, for instance, or the horrible death that might be leveled on the punk character.

Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The last third of the film uses next to nothing of the potential created in the previous two thirds. Once the killer, Porkchop, shows up, the film becomes a poor slasher. In a few minutes most of the characters are dispatched. The robot falls to pieces with one hit--which should be a lot funnier than it actually is. I hoped I'd never say this about any movie, but this could have used fewer pigmen. Or the characters should have put up some amusingly odd fight against the pigman. What does work in the last third of the film is the few bursts of comedy that interrupt the slasher action and the very few moments where horror and comedy really do mix.

While I can't give Porkchop a higher rating given its general weakness as the backwoods horror film it purports to be, I certainly applaud the imagination and absurd humour Eamon Hardiman and co-writer Zack Bassham invest in this film. It's like Revenge of the Nerds meets Don't Go In the Woods made on a $100 budget. Hopefully Hardiman will get better budgets and fulfill his obvious potential better than Porkchop did.

Rage (2010) - 2/4

I have killed a man for wounding me,

A young man for hurting me.

If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold,

Then Lamech seventy-sevenfold. (Gen 4:23-24)

And the insane biker in Rage shall be avenged seven-hundred-seventy-sevenfold, as one offense sends him on a spree of murder and rape of anyone the protagonist, Dennis Twist, knows, has spoken to, has shared breathing space with, or has seen on TV. I exaggerate, but the explanation for the violence is quite tenuous. We all have violent fantasies, most of which are probably disproportionate to the offense that occasioned them. Most of us are very talented at keeping fantasy as fantasy. This film is about a guy who clearly cannot do that. After Dennis (Rick Crawford), a douchebag husband, leaves his sweet wife (Audrey Walker) for a day in town, he meets his mistress and breaks it off in a flurry of exquisitely bad dialogue like, "Were you loving your wife all those times your dick was in me?" He's then pursued by a biker obsessed with making his life miserable, culminating in, as I say, murders and rapes.

You know who else couldn't control their rage? The Great Lord Zeus, King of the Gods. I'm not being glib. Or I am, but only slightly. You see, the filmmaker Christopher Witherspoon, who also plays the biker and has a cameo as The Guy in the Garage Talking about Spielberg's Duel, purposely makes allusions to the biker as a force of fate, not unlike in Greek tragedy. In fact, the Guy in the Garage Talking about Spielberg's Duel even brings up the idea that the truck in Duel is a force of nature. I think Duel is about masculinity, actually, but that's beside the point. The point is that the biker can be seen as a force of pure karma whose personal motivations are scarcely relevant. Dennis's misdeeds, conscious or unconscious, are being revisited upon him many-fold through the person of the biker, and Dennis's guilt allows it to continue. Indeed, were anyone genuinely pursued by karma, our collective misdeeds could seriously fuck us up. Seriously.

When this force of karma is visited upon characters who really have no connection with Dennis's misdeeds, however, the plot is a little lost. Perhaps the anxiety of wanting to make an exciting film had Witherspoon inserting unnecessary violence, or contriving distractions for the biker in order to spare Dennis. I wish he had stuck to his thematic guns and just punished the hell out of Dennis. The character is kind of a douche, though he is trying to do the right thing and return to his wife. However, even when his wife's life may be in danger, he continues trying to hide his affair from her. When she's being assaulted, he cowers in a corner and whines. Dennis continues to whine long beyond the time for whining. So he's not just a douche, he's a pussy too. If anyone deserves enormous on-screen punishment, it's ol' Dennis Twist. Not his wife and not the beer-bellied neighbour. In fact, there is little to no reason provided in the film for harming these people.

I don't think it was wise of Witherspoon to bring up Duel in the midst of Rage, as Rage does not compare favourably. Spielberg's direction of the on-road action is excellent, keeping the momentum of what could so easily be a repetitive and dull film ever increasing until the climax. Moreover, Spielberg had a screenplay by one of the greatest writers of genre screenplays in cinematic history, Richard Matheson, ensuring not an extraneous or weak line of dialogue. Rage does not keep up much momentum, perhaps because there's too much distraction in the city setting chosen. Pausing the chase to discuss fate and the meaning of life with one's therapist doesn't help the pace, nor does bringing one's car in to the garage, chatting with the mechanic, and overhearing a discussion about Spielberg's films. The decision to take the violence off the road for the climactic scenes also serves to divide the action, making it discontinuous and the pace choppy.

Perhaps Rage would have worked best not presenting itself as a road-terror movie, or even staying mostly off-road. Because as a cat-and-mouse road-terror movie, Rage just doesn't hold up to other contenders. Duel, Joy Ride (2001), Hush (2009), and the opening of Jeepers Creepers (2007) are all better at it. This is a major problem in Witherspoon's writing and structuring of the film. Where the film's prime pleasure should be in the cat-and-mouse game, the road games, it really is in the periphery. The cat-and-mouse game is frequently uninteresting or, when interesting, like a bad lover it climaxes too soon. I found myself distracted by the mystery of who is behind the helmet, a mystery that never even threatens our attention in Duel and is already revealed before the action of Joy Ride.

Still, Rage is clearly its own movie with its own themes and internal logic. I enjoyed a good many of the finer touches, dark humour like closing a shower curtain before murdering the victim inside. The sleek, shiny textures of the biker's accoutrement as rendered on digital video are also very enjoyable in a purely sensuous way. And overall, the film does comment on a real truth of this world: there's a lot of rage out there as it is, so we should all try to be a little considerate to others. While a bumpy ride, so to speak, Rage is an interesting film that follows its premises to the end. I hope to see more from Witherspoon, preferably not tying himself to an influence next time.

Road Train (2010) - 2/4

Road Kill is actually the title for non-Aussies. Road Train, or Royd Troyn if we want to transcribe accurately, is the Australian title. A royd troyn, for those of us not in-the-know, is what Americans call a 'semi' and the British call a 'lorry.' But you're also welcome to use 'big rig,' 'Mack truck,' 'transport', and just 'big effin' truck!'. There's a little more to the royd troyn, howehvah. It has not just one but multiple rectangles hooked to the back of it, not unlike a train. Hum.

Road Kill does have to do with a big truck. As in so many other films, like Duel (1971) and Joy Ride (2001), it has to do with a big truck terrorizing the bajeezus out of some road wimps. For better or worse, the writer of Road Kill decides to do something different with the road-terror movie. To wit, the film takes the road-terror movie and turns it into a magic-realist existential journey. Arguably, all road-terror movies are existential journeys. But this one knows it is. I'm not saying it knows what it's doing. I'm just saying the filmmakers were trying to make allegory here.

Just what does the big truck do? It finds and terrorizes two college-aged Australian couples, of course. One of those couples is having sex and the other isn't. The couple that isn't having sex isn't having sex because the female part of the couple decided to also have sex with the male part of the couple that is having sex. Can't blame the male part of the couple that isn't having sex for not wanting to have sex with the slut who screwed his best friend. But he has bigger fish to fry, because of that big truck I should get back to. The big truck finds these mildly unpleasant flakes and runs 'em off the road. When they go to investigate the truck, they find it empty and steal it. Or is it stealing their souls?

As they drive away, they all fall asleep. The presumptuous truck drives them off the road to the edge of a cliff and lets them simmer for a while. They yell at each other a lot, which I think Australians do in any situation good or bad, and ultimately decide to split up. Here the psychology of everyone in the group is perverted while the imagery of Cerberus is superimposed over the truck. Is the truck a vampiric denizen of hell leading these banal young adults to the end they deserve, with a sort of Antonionian sense of contempt for bored and empty lives, or are they all just suffering from sunstroke, dehydration, and infection? Decide for yourself.

Road Kill works a lot better if you imagine most of what happens as a hallucinatory nightmare of sunstroke than as a genuine magic realist mechanism without explanation. Otherwise, you're bound to view these youths as under assault by pure allegory, and in doing so you'll find yourself suffering the same fate. Either way, however, the prime joys of the film are in the explorations of the mechanism of the truck and, I suppose it's implied, the mechanism of fate. My favourite moment is when a character reaches into the guts of the truck seat and pulls out a key, resembling something from a Cronenberg nightmare. While the truck gradually grows more interesting, the character interactions grow increasingly tedious as their psychoses leave no real trace of their original personalities, and thus is evaporated what little character development and dramatic tension between them there was. Watch for the truck.