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I didn't actually watch
very much of this, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, before I found
something better to do. Truth be told, it didn't look all that bad
for a movie that was meant to be bad, about as much fun as most
low-budget, crappy-on-purpose, generally uninspired exploitation
movies of the kind that have become popular in the last ten years or
so, especially on the Syfy Channel. The joke just wore off for me,
and once that happens, why commit to another hour of viewing?
Just ahead of it in the
lineup was another cheap shark attack movie with cartoony CG effects,
this one featuring a giant shark that could wiggle around on land
like a seal. It traps a woman in a cave, so she throws a bundle of
dynamite down its throat and blows it up, sort of like the finale of
Jaws if Jaws cost $200. She exits the cave covered in
seaweed and shark guts, then walks off into the sunset with a guy
dressed like Jimmy Buffett.
It's funny because it's
supposed to be, as is Sharknado, and it makes me think about the
nature of this kind of movie at the present moment. It's great that
cheaply produced exploitation movies are still a big part of the
cinematic landscape (In the interest of not coming off like a
pretentious douche, I'm trying to avoid using words like “film”
and “cinema” instead of “movies”, but for the sake of variety
I'm probably going to show occasional lapses), showing up on cable
and video instead of drive-ins and movie houses like the bygone days
of yesteryear. But there's a marked difference in style. The
majority of monster movies up until the '80's were meant to be taken
more or less at face value, regardless of quality. If there was
humor, it was oriented around the characters; people told jokes or
did funny things, but the movies were not themselves jokes.
A lot of that has
changed. At least as far as Syfy Original Movies go, standard
practice seems to be to produce work that is mostly meant to be a
gag. No one would think Sharktopus or Giant Boa Vs. Monster Gator or
whatever is a straight-faced monster movie. Self-referential irony
is a hallmark of this genre, and since we're living in the
post-post-post-post irony era, where people wear clothes and facial
hair intended to make them look stupid because it's cool to like
stupid things for being stupid, smart low-budget producers put out
stuff designed to make bad movie fans say, “That looks totally
ridiculous, I have to see it.”
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More power to them.
Sometimes you want to watch something unapologetically trashy so you
can point and laugh and roll your eyes. It's a good way to kill an
hour and a half. I'm curious to see where the trend goes in the next
ten years.
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