100 Below Zero (2013)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

Company:  The Asylum

Runtime: 90 mins

Format: Online Streaming Via Space Channel

Plot: When a chain of volcanic eruptions rips through Europe, the enormous ash cloud blocks out the sun, plunging the continent into a new ice age. An American couple must find their college-aged kids and get them out of Paris before it freezes over.

Review: There's nothing like coming home from a long and hard day at work to find out that an upcoming movie from your favorite B-Movie production company has hit the online interwebs early, for free and legally, via the website for the TV channel Space, Canada's affiliate for SyFy. This great revelation was brought to my attention via the lovely Shannon The Movie Moxieso really, it's just as much because of her that I'm able to bring you this early review of 100 Degrees Below Zero (or just simply 100 Below Zero as some sites call it – not really sure which is the official one, seeing as how Asylum's own website and IMDB each list a different version of the title) as it is Space for putting it up in the first place. If you live in Canada, you can head on over to hereto check that out (For a limited time, and with a few commercial breaks), but if you live outside Canada the link is probably Region-Locked and thus you'll have to wait for the official DVD/BluRay release on June 11th.

Now first off, I'm sure I'm not the only one to find it weird that Asylum is releasing a winter disaster movie in the middle of summer. Like seriously, that seems like a missed opportunity to not release this kind of movie in the winter, where the natural ambiance of wet snow beating against your windows while watching this could add that bit of extra oomph. As it is, I'm also not usually a fan of Asylum's disaster movies, and after Age of Dinosaurs earlier this month set the bar for my expectations when it comes to future Asylum movies, 100 Degrees Below Zero had quite a few hurdles to jump over for me.  

A good way to win me over is to have a good and well-acted cast, and that is one thing this movie can proclaim it has loud and proud. We have the always-entertaining John Rhys-Davies as a military General that's keeping an eye on this weird weather phenomenon and in charge of evacuating all the important people of the area. Most people know him from Lord of the Rings, B-Movie fans know him from plenty of SyFy movies like Sabertooth and the later Anaconda sequels, but I will forever know him as The Professor from Sliders – Long live Sliders! It was nice to see a military General in one of these movies actually be a nice guy and not the stereotypical asshole they tend to be in these things, so props for that. It also helped that John Rhys-Davies was actually laugh-out-loud funny at times, especially with his perpetual shock at pretty much any news that was delivered to him – the guy can rock these kinds of movies all day and night, and make every last minute of his screen time enjoyable.

We also have Jeff Fahey (Lost, The Eden Formula, last year's SyFy movie Alien Tornado, Operation Delta Force) once again taking up the role of a pilot, which is quite the nice treat for those of us who are die-hard Lost fans, along with Sara Malakul Lane (Sharktopus, Asylum's 12/12/12, the upcoming Jurassic Block) as his daughter and a couple pretty unknowns as Jeff Fahey's son and new wife, but the fact that they are unknowns is not a testament to their acting as, much like with the others I've mentioned, they were actually surprisingly good actors. Jeff Fahey's kids here are college-age and are actually going to university in Paris, which pleasantly surprised me as that for once, the main focus of this movie is actually not in the U.S. but in France. Normally these kinds of movies (Asylum-made or not) take place in the U.S.A., so it was a nice change from the norm to have this take place largely in Paris. The actors for his kids also had great chemistry together which made their scenes that much more fun to watch, even though Sara Malakul Lane's accent kept slipping in and out, but I can overlook that as she was better then I expected, plus she's just an overall adorable cutie. There are other people and characters in the movie, but they're all pretty crappy to be honest, and pretty much exactly what you would expect from a movie like this.

In all honesty though, it's quite impressive that the acting is as good as it is, because what they're given to work with isn't much – the dialog they have to spew is just painful to listen to, because it's so unrealistic and just not how real people talk. Sentences are very awkwardly-structured, and more often then not filled with piles upon piles of run-on exposition that is not even delivered in any realistic fashion. I can overlook that if it was only in a couple scenes, but the majority of the movie is filled with that, so I'm amazed the actors did such a great job with such crappy dialog.

But the real reason B-Movie fans would be watching a movie like this isn't for the actors or dialog – sure, when those things turn out good, it's an extra bonus, but the real reason people tune into these things are for the fun scenes of disasters. Well...we kind of actually don't get a whole lot of those with this one – For the first hour of this short hour and a half movie, all we get is one scene of some falling hail of larger-then-normal proportions (which admittedly comes with a fun beat of Sara Malakul Lane soccer-kicking one away), and a small earthquake....

...And that's it. 

We do see the aftermath of some major big destruction, but we never actually get to see it happen on-screen, which is a major cop-out seeing as how that's the kind of stuff people are wanting to see in a movie like this. Even during that final half-hour, we don't get much more then that, just one scene of some rushing water flooding a tunnel and a bit of really high wind for the climax that knocks over the Eiffel Tower, and nothing more then that. Hell, the title isn't even accurate! For a movie titled 100 Below Zero, the main characters roam the 'destroyed' city in nothing more then t-shirts for the majority of the time, with not even their breath showing! 100 Degrees Below Zero, my ass.

As for the special effects for these very few scenes of disaster, well they're a mixed bag. Some are better then others, but overall they're not the worst I've seen from this company but they're also nowhere near the best either. The falling hailstones and rushing water was decent, but there was also some truly terrible green-screen work going on in some scenes, even scenes that didn't really require it as there wasn't even anything going on in terms of disasters, just a couple characters walking down a street. Even the scenes where the CGI was decent, such as in the aforementioned moments, it was just kind of a bit of wasted effort since the scenes are so few and far between, and only last about 60 seconds or so.

My anticipation wasn’t very high for this title, but I still had a smidgeon of hope that maybe it would be better then the other recent Asylum disaster movies like Super Cyclone, 40 Days and Nights, or 500 MPH Storm. While this movie certainly had a better, more well-acted cast then any of those, and that cast all had great chemistry with one another, plus the film started off seeming like it would be a better movie at the beginning, but it ended up loosing all of the leeway by having a boring script with no really fun disaster scenes, and hardly any disaster scenes, period, which is the one thing those other movies actually did kind of well, even if their effects work wasn't the greatest for those scenes. Add to that the annoyingly atrocious dialog and this is yet another Asylum-made disaster flick that can probably just be skipped.

3/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

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Dinoshark (2010)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

COMPANY: New Horizons

RUNTIME: 92 mins

FORMAT: BluRay

PLOT: A baby Pliosaur, a long-extinct prehistoric species of shark, swims away when the chunk of Arctic glacier that it had been frozen in breaks away due to global warming. Three years later, this 'Dinoshark' is a ferocious predatory adult and has made its way to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico where it starts killing tourists and locals just offshore.

REVIEW: Over the course of this upcoming weekend (August 18th and 19th), the Space Channel here in Canada is airing some kind of Killer Shark Movie Marathon, where-in they will be airing such classics as Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus and its sequel Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus, Sharktopus, Jersey Shore Shark Attack, Malibu Shark Attack, Dinocroc, Swamp Shark, and Dinoshark. Space was kind enough to send me a screener of Dinoshark for review, however I actually already owned that one on BluRay, so for the purpose of this review I'll actually be watching the BluRay copy in glorious HD! If you're interested in checking this one out for yourself, and you live in Canada, it will be airing at 6pm tomorrow night on August 18th on Space, but I highly recommend you tune in for the entire weekend of movies, because I've already seen each and every one of those and they all come pretty highly recommended by myself, even if I don't yet have reviews for all of them.

Now, the plot for this one is nothing special. In fact, it's a plot we've seen dozens of times over in dozens of almost-identical movies: Prehistoric shark gets thawed out from a glacier, makes its way to a beach-resort town and starts causing havoc (this time it's in Mexico though, as opposed to someplace within the United States, which was a welcomed change of locale). Of course our main ragtag group of  friends are the first to discover what's going on but nobody believes them when they try to warn the town, and with a big water-based event approaching, the town officials refuse to let anything get in the way of that event taking place, which of course leads to said prehistoric shark creating a massive bloodbath. Chances are you can name at least ten other movies with almost that exact same plot right off the top of your head at this very moment. And yes, while the plot is very uninspired and bland, the majority of everything else in the movie makes up for it and you don't even realize just how generic the plot is until after it's over and done with and you're thinking back on it.

A large reason for that is the fact that almost every character in this movie, from the main guy (played by The O.C.'s Eric Balfour) who's back in town after spending a long time away and he's living on his boat trying to find work, to his childhood pal who's now with Harbor Patrol and is stuck between helping his friend out and doing his job, to the ex-girlfriend/now-bestfriend girl, to the asshole Harbor Patrol Captain that hates the main character and goes out of his way to make things difficult for him and to try to pin crimes on him, to every other speaking-part in the movie – everyone has something about them that makes them enjoyable to watch and you can really have fun with this cast of characters. Helping that along are of course the actors who play them, who all do a surprisingly above-average job for a B-movie of this kind. I was also surprised to see Roger Corman have a pretty decent-sized role here. He almost always cameos in his own movies lately, but very rarely does he give himself such a large part as he does in this one, which was the role of a marine-life expert that has all the knowledge on this creature and helps the main cast out.

Another surprising factor is that because you enjoy these characters so much, you actually don't want to see many of them, if any, get killed (which plenty do, and not always ones you would expect) – it's actually pretty nice having a killer animal movie once in awhile where you actually aren’t rooting for the animal to slaughter every person on-screen. Between caring for the characters as well as finding out pretty early-on that characters you wouldn't normally expect to die, sometimes does in this movie, also adds an unexpected level of tension to some of the action and stalking scenes, which is another aspect that many of these fun summer popcorn monster B-movies normally don't bother to aim for. Also along those same lines of things these movies don't tend to do often, this movie had a really nice structured build-up. It wasn't just random scene after random scene that really could have been placed in any mix-and-match order, like say Piranhaconda or Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, but instead there was a steady progression of intensity from scene-to-scene as the movie went on, and it gave a really nice natural flow to the movie that's not often seen in these.

As for the actual Dinoshark creature itself, overall both the CGI and practical effects looked really good and another above-average aspect of the movie, though the shark did tend to change size pretty constantly throughout the movie, depending on what the scene called for (in one scene it can almost eat a boat in one bite, while in another it's dragging a human carcass through the water in its jaws and the human body can hardly fit in its mouth), but after watching these movies on a fairly regular basis you tend to just get used to that sort of size-changing anomaly, to the point where I almost never even pick up on it anymore. It helps as well that you stay distracted from the size changes because unlike many B-movies, this one keeps your attention pretty well, leaving little to no time for your mind to wander to other things, such as the changing size of the creature - trust me, there are plentyof cheese-filled campy scenes with this beastie! Putting aside the opening scenes of it escaping the glacier and shortly afterward eating a diver, there's still many great gem scenes, such as the one where Eric Balfour drives toward it on a jet ski and launches himself into the air toward the creature while throwing a grenade at it, or where it propels itself out of the water and takes down a low-flying helicopter, or when it snacks down on the participants of an all-girls teen water polo match, and of course the bloody massacre that the entire movie leads up to.

I do have one slight issue, but it's not a mark against the movie itself but more-so with the BluRay. The video on the BluRay cut back and forth pretty regularly; When it was good, it was perfect and pristine and exactly the kind of thing HD was made for, but just as often it was also pretty bad with an overabundance of grain present, with no rhyme or reason as to why some scenes were great while others were beyond shitty like that.

Dinoshark may not have been as unique or memorable as movies like Sharktopus or the Mega Shark series, but I would say it's an overall better movie in almost every regard, and I find it's a great gateway movie to kind of introduce newcomers to the B-movie genre by including plenty of cheese but without letting it define the movie or overtake it, and both the acting and effects-work remained above-average throughout, so it shouldn't scare away newbies like many B-movies would with their horrible acting and effects.

All in all, this turned out to be an entertaining entry in the killer shark sub-genre, and one that I would recommend to both B-movie lovers as well as just casual people looking to check out their first B-movie.

8/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

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Bigfoot (2012)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

COMPANY: The Asylum

RUNTIME: 88 mins

FORMAT: Screener

PLOT: When a Bigfoot attacks an 80s-themed music festival, a concert promoter and a hippie burnout that are at odds with each other both set out to bring in the creature.

REVIEW: We're coming up on the final movie of what SyFy has been calling 'The Most Dangerous Month On Television', which has been made-up of the four weekly Original Movies starting with Jersey Shore Shark Attack, continuing with Piranhaconda and Arachnoquake, and now ending things off with Asylum's furry-Hulk-starring creature feature Bigfoot. And oh boy, what a month this has been – I don't think I've ever before had such a busy month filled with so much excellent cheese and B-Movie goodness. I don't even know what I'm going to do with my spare time after this, when the Original Movies slack off a bit and go back to having only one or two a month – don't get me wrong, it'll be nice to have a little breather, but I've been spoiled by having so many great new B-movies in such quick succession this month, hahaha.

Much like with Jersey Shore Shark Attack and Arachnoquake, this one will not only be airing on SyFy at 9pm Eastern on the night of June 30th, but also in Canada on the Space Channel as well; I love the fact that Space here in Canada is airing more and more of these movies at the same time as SyFy. I'd also like to thank the Space Channel once again for sending the screener of Bigfoot my way for early review – they've been a big help this month with providing me early screeners for many of the SyFy Original Movies, and without them I wouldn't have been able to have nearly as many reviews posted to the blog this month. What's a bit odd to me though, is that Bigfoot (still think it deserves a less generic and more cheese-filled name) is a bit of a strange pick to end off a month of summer B-movies for the simple fact that it actually takes place in the winter, with lots of snow and winter weather abound in it. Kind of an odd choice to have a month filled with movies that take place along the beaches of the Jersey Shore, in the hot jungles of Hawaii, or in the humid swamp lands of New Orleans, to then finish it all off with a movie that takes place in the winter, with snow storms and the like.

Anyway, this one plays off of the real-life rivalry between two classic TV legends by bringing in Danny Bonaduce from The Partridge Family and Barry Williams from The Brady Bunch. Danny Bonaduce plays a local small-town legend radio show host that hires a construction crew to clear a ton of forest land so they can make room for an upcoming 80s-themed music festival, with the intent of bringing back classic 80s rockers such as Alice Cooper and Sting (only one of which appears in the movie). That construction however, is cutting into the Sasquatch's home turf and disturbing it, causing the creature to be very angry and hostile, and thus the events of this movie take place due to that. Barry Williams plays the leader of a group of hardcore environmentalists that are willing to go to extreme lengths to protest this deforestation (and then later in the movie, they also run a 'Protect Bigfoot' campaign). As you can imagine, this becomes grounds for plenty of great tension-filled confrontations between these two characters, with tons of winks and nods to real-life stuff regarding the two of them.

If this all sounds a tad familiar, well that's because there was a similar rivalry between 80s teen singers Debbie Gibson and Tiffiny in a previous Asylum/SyFy movie titled Mega Python vs Gatoroid. Hell, there's even a similar brawl between these two guys that has a hilarious initiation that I won't spoil here, though sadly it didn't go on for as long as the one between Gibson and Tiffany did in Mega Python vs Gatoroid. This one was really quite short and not at all as fulfilling, but it still had a couple hilarious moments during it. Actually, it's pretty clear that Asylum intended this as a non-sequel follow-up to Mega Python vs Gatoroid, due to the massive amounts of similarities between the two, so I'm not really sure why SyFy and Asylum aren’t promoting this movie nearly as well as they did with that one – For Mega Python vs Gatoroid they had the two leading ladies go through the press circuit and make their interview rounds with several websites and well-known magazines, as well as host the movie the night of its airing, have a one-night-only theatrical screening of which they were in attendance, as well as had both of them release new song Singles to go along with the movie. This time around, none of those things are present for Bigfoot. Anyway, rounding out the main cast is the stereotypical small town Sheriff that these movies always have. This one is played by Sherilyn Fenn of Twin Peaks fame, who is only temporarily taking up the role of Sheriff from her recently-deceased father, until they find someone to take the job full-time. She's in the movie quite a bit (just as much as Danny Bonaduce and Barry Williams) but regardless, she still doesn't really have a whole lot to do here.

Of course, you can't talk about the cast of a movie called Bigfoot without mentioning the title creature itself, as it plays just as much of a character in the movie as anybody. In regards to that, what will become clear very early-on for those who are not already familiar with The Asylum, is that they are certainly no masters of subtlety; They show off the hairy Hulk in all it's full-on rage and glory not even 60 seconds into the movie. No build-up or anything, just boom, there it is, standing tall and roaring loud. And good GOD, does it stand tall. Very tall. The Asylum cranked this creature's size up to max and completely super-sized it – not one word of a lie, the Bigfoot in this movie is pretty much just about the same size as King Kong. Even when he walks, the ground trembles and his footsteps sound like the footsteps of the Tyrannosaurus Rex from Jurassic Park. Considering its gigantic size, loud walking, and its penchant for constant rage-roaring, I find it amazing that these creatures are still only myth and have gone so long unnoticed. Then again, maybe it goes so long unnoticed because the damn thing brutally kills any witnesses; There's even one scene where it takes out an entire construction crew in a matter of seconds – Sasquatch don't play around. As for how it looks...weeellll...the CGI is up and down. There are some shots were it looks excellent while there are other shots where it looks horrible (especially towards the end). If anything, I'd say the CGI model itself looks great, but it just doesn't interact with the physical real world stuff very well at all and looks terrible when it tries to. One thing in regards to the CGI that I was surprised with though, and I also greatly appreciated, is there was this one scene where the Sasquatch is rampaging through the town and a tank fires upon it. From that scene on, the creature's face is badly burned and it's missing patches of fur from its upper body. That's more detail then is usually put into these things, and even though a lot of the CGI was pretty bad, I can still really appreciate the effort for that bit of continuity.

Another bit that surprised me was the fact that the 80s-themed music festival that all the promos mention as being the center of the movie, actually happens pretty early-on, and in the end had very little impact on the movie itself. In Mega Python vs Gatoroid, the main event of the movie was built up to gradually over the course of the movie and happened towards the end (as they so-often do in these movies), so I never once for a second even considered that this movie would be any different. Surprisingly, by 30 minutes in, the two leads have it out between one another several times, make-up and get along for a short period of time, have it out again that will last the rest of the movie, the music festival starts, and Hulkfoot (as I like to refer to the monstrously oversized and rage-filled Sasquatch as) interrupts by going on the expected rampage and killing half the concert-goers, which included my two favorite deaths of the movie – one via a falling port-a-potty and the other gets ripped in half by the Sasquatch. Also, it's during this scene that Alice Cooper cameos as himself, as a special guest at this outdoor concert, and of course he doesn't last long once Bigfoot shows up. Yes, I know, I know, this movie follows all the same beats and even some of the same jokes as Mega Python vs Gatoroid, but if a certain formula works well then why screw with it? Plus Alice Cooper's hilarious face-off with Bigfoot here was such a better moment then when Micky Dolenz bit it in the other movie. He may only be on-screen for a moment or two, but Alice Cooper totally steals the entire movie during that brief time.

The remaining hour of the movie consists mostly of Danny Bonaduce and a group of hunter friends trying to hunt down and kill Bigfoot (and then later switching to trying to capture it alive to make them rich by turning it into a tourist attraction), Barry Williams and his group of environmentalists trying to protect and save Bigfoot (and later trying to capture it to transport it to a nature preserve), continuing confrontations between those two characters, the military arriving and setting up a perimeter around the town to protect them against further Bigfoot rampages (which, shocker, doesn't work well), some not-so-smart residents venturing into the forests to try to get pictures and videos of Bigfoot to put online or sell, and of course Bigfoot itself continuing to rampage around - first through the forests, then back into the town for a bit before being chased away into the mountain-range. Of course nothing that I just mentioned above really works out well for anyone involved, many other people die, tons of more property damage happens, and it culminates in a pretty decent set of scenes of the Sasquatch climbing the famous Mount Rushmore president faces, as well as our two main rival leads fighting one another atop those as well. And if you've seen Mega Python vs Gatoroid, you can take a pretty accurate guess as to how that scene turns out for everyone involved (though not without a pretty interesting little twist first).

What stops the movie from reaching its potential (other then needing to bring Bigfoot back down to a more realistic size), is that neither character played by the rival 70s TV stars are as interesting or as engaging as the rival characters played by Debbie Gibson and Tiffany in Mega Python vs Gatroid. The actors did great with the material, don't get me wrong there, they were both excellent actors, it was just the characters themselves weren’t interesting or likable in the least. Really, the only scenes with them in it that I enjoyed at all were pretty much just the scenes that they were both in together – they had excellent enemy-chemistry together, but when they were apart I just wasn't invested in either of them. Adding to that, after the awesome Music Festival rampage that was filled with all sorts of unique and fun Bigfoot-related kills, the deaths during the rest of the movie were pretty much the exact same – The Bigfoot either picked a person up, bit off their head, and then threw the rest of the body away, or it stomped on them and squished them into the ground. Not a whole lot of variety there to keep things fresh, which was a pretty big letdown after the first thirty minutes created such promise for a wide variety of cheesy death scenes.

Alice Cooper cameo aside, I still think Mega Python vs Gatoroid is the more entertaining of these movies, by a long shot. This one is still a decent companion piece for that one, to watch afterward, with its main faults being boring and unlikable lead characters, uneven CGI, repetitive kill scenes, and a terrible oversized scale for the title creature - it's definitely not Asylum's best, or even the best SyFy Original Movie this month.

However, while this one doesn't have much of a re-watch factor with me, it did keep my attention well enough while watching for the first time, and if you're into B-Movies like I am then it's worth giving a once-over when it airs on SyFy and Space on Saturday, just don't go into it with the expectation that it's as good as Mega Python vs Gatoroid, or even as good as most of the other Original Movies this month.

5/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

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Jersey Shore Shark Attack (2012)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

COMPANY: ARO Entertainment

RUNTIME: 88 mins

FORMAT: Screener

PLOT: It's a holiday weekend at the Jersey Shore and, unbeknownst to anyone, underwater drills have attracted dozens of albino bull sharks to the pier. When a man goes missing, The Complication, Nookie, and their friends fear the worst and plead with the police chief to close down the beach, but of course no one listens. Now, the Preppies must work together with the Guidos in order to save the Jersey Shore and its inhabitants from a vicious slaughter.

REVIEW: I pretty much didn't give Jersey Shore Shark Attack a second-glance when it was first announced. There's just been such an over-abundance of killer shark movies flooding the B-Movie market in the last several years that I've stopped caring about them (though I can still admit when one comes along that I really enjoy, such as 2-Headed Shark Attack). Ever since then however, I've been slowly coming around on this one, first some behind-the-scenes photos that looked interesting, then the fact that they seemed to perfectly spoof the hit MTV show Jersey Shore and the cast on that (even going so far as to hire Vinny, one of the stars of Jersey Shore, to be in this movie), then as each trailer came out showing more and more footage, I was completely won over and excited, despite my earlier lack of caring.

Then SPACE comes along and offers to send me an early screener copy for review, so of course I jumped at the chance so I can see if the excitement that this project ended up making me feel during production would pay off, or if I was better off listening to my initial gut feelings. And for those wondering how you can get your hands on this one to make up your own mind, Jersey Shore Shark Attack airs tomorrow night, June 9^th, at 9pm Eastern Time on SPACE here in Canada and on SyFy in the United States.

I can honestly say, right from the opening minutes I was pretty much hooked. This is more then just a regular B-Movie – this is a full-on spoof movie kind of like the ones made by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, only – you know – actually good. You'll find this movie funny anyway, but if you've had experience watching any large amount of MTV's Jersey Shore then you'll get oh-so-many more laughs out of this; They do perfect parodies of the cast (Nookie instead of Snooki, The Complication instead of The Situation, ect), they way they talk, the specific things they constantly say, the way they act – it's all here, complete with all the drinking, fighting, slutty dancing, hook-ups, and fist-pumping of that show, and it's all parodied to perfection. Actually, they do such a great job of it, that for a few seconds somewhere in the midst of it all, I almost forgot I was watching a SyFy Original Movie and (just for a second, mind you) thought I was watching an actual episode of Jersey Shore. Hell, they even have those grainy-film transitions between scenes that Jersey Shore uses – you know the ones...with the words that flash in them...? Wait...am I the only one that's familiar with Jersey Shore here? It was all for the research – I swear!

To sell the perfect parodying shown here of course, a large part of it comes down to the actors and how well they play the roles, and here they do excellent. They may not be the greatest actors ever, but they certainly know how to mimic the cast of Jersey Shore quite well, right down to specific tiny little mannerisms. Put these people in any other movie and they'll probably bomb, but here they were rock stars in my eyes. Of course, I can't talk about the cast without talking about a couple of the guest stars as well – two of them specifically. The first being Jersey Shore's own Vinny Guadagnino (seriously, the most 'normal' and sane person on that entire show, and not at all a jackass like most of the other people are portrayed as, but anyway - moving on...). Fans of Jersey Shore may be disappointed that he's regulated to cameo status here, as some of the advertising would have you believe he plays a larger role, however having spent many years watching these kinds of movies I was full-on expecting that anyway. Here he plays a news reporter in a few scenes, and he's honestly not very good, but he seems pretty self-aware of that fact and you can tell he's just having a blast doing his scenes, as short as they are. He fully understands that he's in a movie that's making fun of the show that made him famous, and he's in on the joke instead of being the butt of the joke. The other cameo guest appearance is by N'Sync member Joey Fatone, playing himself as he's the guest of honor at the Jersey Shore's 4^thof July Shore Party, which of course the albino bull sharks interrupt and, well, if you've seen Mega Python vs Gatoroid (in which legendary Monkee's rocker Mickey Dolenz had a cameo in), then you'll probably already have a good idea as to Joey Fatone's role in the movie.

And that is a nice way to seq-way into one of my main complaints here. The CGI for the albino bull sharks look atrocious, even by B-Movie standards, and what the hell was up with their mouths? Seriously, whenever they attacked they seemed to morph into the Leviathan from the latest season of Supernatural, and I'm not even joking. They were made all the more distracting by the fact that whenever there was a close-up of one of the sharks munching down on someone, it was practical effects (also not that well-made, though admittedly, better then the bendy-teeth practical close-ups from 2-Headed Shark Attack).

Luckily this movie didn't shy away from the bloody red stuff (to the point where I'll actually be surprised if SyFy and SPACE leave it all in without cutting any of it down). This movie was filled with lots of blood and gory shots to appease any gorehound, so even though the Leviathan themselves...err...I meant the sharks...even though they were horrible, they more then made up for it by at least making their attacks still really fun to watch due to how violent they were; My personal favorite is this one scene where a fisherman gets his fingers bit off and the laughably-fake blood just keeps pumping and squirting out of them – good stuff! I was also really impressed by the fact that our less-then-intelligent Guido and Guidette leads were able to figure out what exactly was going on so quickly. Most movies of this kind don't have the main cast figuring things out until towards the end, but they were able to quickly deduce that there were sharks invading the Jersey Shore after one of the first couple of victims got killed, and then instantly set out to stop them...with an arsenal of fireworks...? In all seriousness though, that scene is a total laugh-riot, and if you know how the real Jersey Shore cast is like then you can imagine how that ends up ultimately playing out (hint: there's a bit of horsing around, a firecracker is accidentally dropped into their bag of firecrackers, and well...boat goes boom). Though with that said, they surprisingly still manage to do a bit of damage to the sharks in that scene as well. Actually, the sharks seemed rather easy to kill in this movie - most of the time they just have to get shot in their fin as it's sticking above the water and that seemed to do the trick in almost every single case.

Sadly, when the movie was not focusing on the sharks killing people, or the Jersey Shore spoof cast, it got a bit boring as it followed around characters that just weren’t interesting (Like the Sheriff, the greedy Oil Tycoon, or the Mayor.) Where the Jersey Shore spoof cast, as well as Vinny, knew what kind of low-grade B-movie they were in, these side characters (all played by recognizable names) seemed to think they were in a much better movie then they actually were. Their acting was good, don't get me wrong there. Actually it was some of the best acting in the entire movie, but that's almost the problem – they played their roles a bit too straight-faced, and I just found those characters, and the time spent focusing on them, to just not be that interesting and it really wrecked the flow of the movie and slowed the pacing of it down more often then not. Luckily though, they didn't give us an over-abundance of these scenes, and the rest of the movie was enjoyable enough that these scenes are pretty quickly forgotten about once they were over.

Even without the whole killer shark parts of this movie, Jersey Shore Shark Attack would still have been an excellent Jersey Shore parody movie, filled with equal parts making fun of as well as love towards the source material. The really bad effects work and uninteresting sub-plots do bring the overall enjoyment down just a tad, but there's still enough hilarity and fun to keep this movie afloat.

I actually wouldn't mind seeing further 'Jersey Shore' spoof movies with this same cast of characters returning – Jersey Shore Arack Attack next perhaps? Jersey Shore Avian Assault for Part 3? Somebody get on that. 

8/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

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Arachnoquake (2012)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

COMPANY: Active Entertainment

RUNTIME: 86 mins

FORMAT: Screener

PLOT: After earthquakes ravage New Orleans, dozens of locals fall victim to a previously unknown species of deadly albino spiders. Despite their best efforts, spiders swarm out of the earthquake-opened fissures and infest the city.

REVIEW: I've been backing killer spider movies now for awhile, hoping that they would overtake the shark movies as the popular go-to killer animal for B-Movie companies, however the first of many killer spider movies to hit this year, Roger Corman's Camel Spiders, was only so-so and far from the great 'Second Coming' that I was hoping it would be to usher in the other killer arachnid movies of 2012 and beyond. Well luckily, coming up on Saturday, June 23rd at 9pm Eastern Time on Space: The Imagination Station in Canada, and the SyFy Channel in the U.S., we have our second major spider movie of 2012 – the awesomely-titled Arachnoquake, starring none other then John Connor himself, Edward Furlong! And huge thanks to the wonderful people at Space: The Imagination Station (The Canadian affiliate for The SyFy Channel) for sending me a screener copy of Arachnoquake to check out for early review!

Sadly, my screener copy was only 58 minutes long. It would seem, judging by the regular length of a SyFy Original Movie, that there's roughly half an hour missing from the screener and I think a large portion of that, if not all, is the end. There may be a tad missing from the beginning, since when the screener starts it opens on two characters talking about the earthquake that's already happened, and one of them had already been bitten by a spider, but the title screen comes up shortly after that so I'm thinking that might really be how the movie starts. An hour into it though, the video just abruptly ends mid-battle, so I can't really comment on how it finishes or on anything that may be contained within that last half an hour. With that said, it's certainly a great way to get me to review the screener but still make sure I tune in for the movie when it airs, because I really loved what I saw here and I just can't wait to find out how it all finishes!

Arachnoquake starts off with a group of co-workers that work at a small egg farm out in the woods, and as they work and horse around with one another, they talk about a mysterious earthquake in the area the night before, and one of them complains about having been bitten by something in his sleep. It doesn't take long after that before we discover that the earthquake unleashed a nest of killer mutated albino spiders in the middle of New Orleans, that had previously been trapped below the ground where they evolved through the generations to the way they are now. Of course, as these things go in movies such as this, pretty soon after that the spiders start causing havoc in New Orleans and turn the city into an all-you-can-eat buffet of Human as they continue to grow and multiply, leaving it up to a slacker tour bus driver and his diverse group of tourists for the hour, to save the day.

I had quite a few surprises waiting for me within the confines of this movie, none of which I was expecting. First up is the acting; a few roles aside, the acting really impressed me from almost everyone, and not once did I ever stop and think 'Boy, that was some horrible acting right there.' Heck, even though Edward Furlong is the bigger name, it was Bug Hall as the slacker tour bus guide that really surprised me, and he was a much better actor then Furlong (who falls into the small 'few roles aside' section). Also, you just have to love that name – Bug Hall. My only wish at this point is that his next SyFy Original Movie be one about killer bugs. You just know he has to do it at some point (Bugpocolypse: Starring Bug Hall - seriously, somebody get on that). Also because of his great acting, as well as most everyone else's top-notch skills in this, a lot of the comedic beats honestly came across as genuinely funny. Far too often in B-Movies, moments that are meant to be funny just come across as a lame attempt, but here almost every time (and there is indeed quite a few), all the comedic beats and funny one-liners are full hits, thanks in large part to everyone's excellent comedic timing and acting abilities. Make no mistake – this movie knows exactly what it is and has tons of fun with it, and tons of fun making fun of itself, with almost every scene having some form of comedy within it, be it a visual gag, a one-liner, a silly sound effect, or an insane situation. Actually, one of my favorites is a Deep Blue Sea speech moment. Even though here it's pretty easy to spot coming from a mile away thanks to how the frame was obviously shot, but that didn't make it any less hilarious when it happened.

Another of the surprises are the creature effects. Are they great? No. But they are quite passable and fit within the surrounding physical environments far better then they did in Camel Spiders, and they never once took me out of the moment. Then again, it's hard to be taken out of the moment by low-quality effects when what they're doing is so amazingly cheesy that is is literally candy for the eyes; We have giant mutated albino killer spiders of all sizes ranging from tennis ball-sized to as large as a car rampaging through New Orleans and the surrounding backwoods areas, chomping down on people and webbing entire vehicles up, and we also have a few other little treats such as a scene where an alligator fights with one of the giant spiders in the swamps, and Edward Furlong, along with the girl softball team he coaches, take their bats to an attacking spider with hilarious results. Oh, and despite their large sizes, magically they're still light enough to walk on top of water, and scurry fast enough on it that they can keep up with a speeding boat! Like I said, such awesome cheese to fill your mind that the last thing you're thinking of are the effects because you're just having such a blast with everything else. And that's not even the cheesiest stuff with the spiders! There is one, um...special ability...that they can do, that I won't ruin here in my review, but let's just say I totally was not expecting it, and I loved it every time they utilized it (and the effects for it were indeed really well-done and realistic-looking).

Of course with a killer animal movie, there are two main aspects viewers normally look at – the animals themselves, and the kill scenes. While the death-by-spider scenes were normally either off-screen or light on the red gooy stuff, they made up for that by having very disgusting spider 'births'. See, it's never really explained how (at least not in the first hour that I saw), but everybody that got bitten by one of these spiders had spider eggs implanted in them within that bite, and it doesn't take very long for those baby spiders to...well...burst out. Yes - of the skin, in a grisly and disgusting display of puss and gore, done with a mix of CGI and excellent practical effects.

I do have one complaint though, but it really is only a minor one and it's to be expected in low budget fair like this where they don't exactly have lots of money to spend on background extras, but MAN, New Orleans sure is empty this time of year. There was rarely (if ever) anyone else on the streets of this supposed 'Party Central' city, other then our main group of characters, that at times I was starting to think if maybe what came up out of the ground wasn't albino spiders but really The Ancient Enemy from the 1998 movie-based-on-the-book Phantoms (Screw ya'll, I loved that movie). It would have been a nice touch to see other background people reacting to the invading army of spiders as well.

Apocalyptically-empty city aside though, there were some really great set pieces on display here, such as the tour bus weaving in and out of stand-still traffic in the middle of the city to try to shake off the spiders that were crawling all over it, or the above-mentioned spider chase across the surface of a bayou, or the spiders dragging someone through the thick vegetation of the swampy forest. And I must say, speaking as someone who spent three years in my youth working at a grocery store – I REALLY enjoyed this one scene where the main crew of characters were chased by one of the spiders through a grocery store (which much like the entire city around them was also 100% void of other people). Actually, this movie started really quick with the action and almost never let up on it for the entire run-time, save for maybe 60 seconds here and there in between, and almost every action scene took place within a different set piece so we got quite a nice variety of locations, which in my eyes was a really good creative decision as it prevented the movie from ever getting stale or repetitive. I'm always saying that the worst crime that a B-Movie can commit is to be boring, and this is certainly not guilty of that.

Having not yet been able to view the final half an hour, that's pretty much all I can say on the movie for now. I'm even more anxious then ever to watch the movie when it airs on June 23rd, cause I enjoyed the first hour so much that I'm looking forward to seeing how it all wraps up, especially after having seen some photos online of a couple shots from during that last half hour of the movie that included one of the spiders so big that it was as large as a house, climbing up two skyscrapers, and another shot of it in-battle with some military vehicles – NICE. My below rating is based on just the first hour, so it could easily go up or sink lower (or remain the same), depending on how that last half hour plays out when I watch it on Space. Either way, when Arachnoquake airs in-full on TV look to my Twitter page or Facebook Page to see what my thoughts on that final half hour were, since I don't really see the point in writing up a second review.

Missing 30 minutes aside though (since I can't really speak to that yet), this was a much better killer spider movie then Camel Spiders was, and more along the lines of what I was expecting Camel Spiders to be. If the other upcoming killer spider movies of 2012/2013 (Mega Spider and Spiders 3D) are anything like this, then spider movies still could be in the running to overtake the throne from the sharks as the new Rulers of the killer animal B-Movies! Muah ha ha ha ha!

9/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

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