Jersey Shore Shark Attack (2012)

I guess I'm being gracious in giving this movie a solid "4." But I'm not ashamed to say that I anxiously waited a week to see "Jersey Shore Shark Attack." As its title would imply, this straight-to-TV SyFy movie, directed by John Shepphird, is a direct, albeit semi-hip and self-knowing, rip-off of "Jaws" (1975) and a hilarious parody of MTV's hit reality TV series "Jersey Shore."

There's a special type of culture for a movie like this, and that is the people who like "movies that are so bad, they're good"; I'm not really in that crowd, just so you know. Yet in a wasteland of bad made-for-TV movies, it is quite possible that this is the best SyFy movie they've ever produced, which unfortunately does not say much about the channel's abysmal track record of weekly "Jaws" rip-offs as a whole.

I love "Jaws," and I'm not afraid to admit to being a viewer of the so-called social "degenerates" on "Jersey Shore"; how many of us truly have our shameless reality TV addictions? We all do. But you have to give the movie credit when it does feature one of the real-live genuine "Jersey Shore" cast members (Vinny Guadagnino) and a former boy band band-mate (Joey Fatone of *NSYNC) in self-knowing cameos as themselves.

A plot summary is pretty useless, but I'll go ahead anyway, in one sentence: During the Fourth of July weekend, prehistoric, deep-sea albino bullsharks are terrorizing Seaside Heights, New Jersey, and it's up to the hard-partying members of a "Jersey Shore"-like reality TV show to stop them. That's it. Although it's unlikely that you could ever count on the drunken beach-goers of Seaside Heights to save the day from man-eating sharks, SyFy is politely asking us to turn our brains off for two hours and enjoy the show.

"Jersey Shore Shark Attack's" merits (incredibly, yes, it does have a few) comes from its knowing self-awareness of its source material. The trick is combining the two sources effectively, and it does so. The movie begins like "Jaws" in its first five minutes, before going on to "Jersey Shore"-like debauchery and shenanigans with Shore-house cast-mate TC/"The Complication" (Jeremy Luc) waking up in bed after a drunken one-night stand with a bikini-clad local floozy, followed by a wet-&-wild wet T-shirt contest at a local bar. Things climax with a bar-room brawl between the Shore-house cast-mates and a group of upper-crust college grads, before comfortably moving back into "Jaws" territory when an ensuing foot-chase between the two conflicting parties down the boardwalk ends with one of the drunken locals becoming shark food.

The CGI special effects are pretty poor, but there are some spectacularly bloody shark attacks that are way more likely to elicit gut-busting laughs than screams. But I don't blame them; it is SyFy, after all.

"Jersey Shore Shark Attack" is a SyFy movie that is better than the rest of the crop of like-minded monster movies the channel is prone to putting out on a weekly basis. The keys to its marginal success are its attempts at combining "Jaws" with the outlandish antics of "Jersey Shore," complete with the requisite gory animal attacks of the former and the bad Italian-American stereotypes (complete with a Snooki-like character delightfully called "Nooki" and a guy with a Pauly D-styled blowout hairdo) of the latter.

Whoever dreamt up the crazy concept for this movie, I'd just like to shake his hand, for he has a cult classic that he can be more or less semi-proud of.

4/10