Ouija Shark (2020) - Review Thread
Jun 26, 2020 17:23:23 GMT -5
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Deexan, PG Cooper, and 3 more like this
Post by 1godzillafan on Jun 26, 2020 17:23:23 GMT -5
Part of the "Movies Dracula Wouldn't Use to Wipe His Ass" series!
Someone needs to get ahold of Jibbs and have him note this for next year's Academy Awards betting pool, because I think I found next year's easy frontrunner!
Chances are sometime within the next year we'll get endless posts from Dracula, PG Cooper, Doomsday, PhantomKnight, and SnoBorderZero gushing about some bullshit movie about a 80 year old Vietnam Vet dealing with PTSD while going back to college to finish the education he never had; also he's gay and in love with his married teacher, has a college BFF who is in early stages of transition, is half black/half Asian because diversity, and, despite being an American main character in Oklahoma, it's filmed entirely in French with Cantonese subtitles because ART!
At long last I have a real movie I can relate to, firmly establishing what you should do when you find a ouija board on the beach and accidentally unleash a translucent shark that eats all of your friends. Every goddamn summer I deal with this shit and it's nice to finally be acknowledged.
While at the store the other day, something gravitated me to a copy of Ouija Shark, which upon first glance looked like one of those movies Asylum would make for SyFy and makes a profit solely through sales from dickheads with YouTube channels that have less than 200 subscribers who bought the movie only so they can do one of their awful "angry movie review" shtick that everyone else on YouTube does (the smart YouTubers have endless videos of kittens and men getting punched in the balls). Ouija Shark is not one of those movies, surprisingly, though it will likely lead to the same result.
Something was eerily calling me about this DVD. I don't know if it was some higher power guiding me or just the simple fact that I found the title "Ouija Shark" hilarious, but I knew I MUST own this movie. I knew one day I could proudly look back on my life and tell my grandchildren that in the middle of a pandemic where we simultaneously had riots about black people being killed by cops, I was so bored that I purchased a copy of Ouija Shark and loved every fucking minute of it.
The movie starts with a redhead named Jill stopping by a beach, stripping down to her bikini and going for a swim. I want to point out right here how this movie subverts expectations, as most movies like this feature women who are supermodel skinny with abs, but Jill and almost every other female character in the movie is of an average body type that real women can identify with. Jill also has really big, non silicone boobs, as do most of the other women in this movie, so while I want to give the movie points for not conforming to traditionally near impossible body image, I think the director just had a "type."
Anyway, Jill gets into the water and we get an underwater shot that's all yellow and foggy for some reason. Before I can fully try and figure out what the movie's trying to say by the water turning yellow the instant she walks in, she gets spooked by something and runs out of the water, scared. Upon running back onto the beach, she finds a ouija board, which actually looks like a broken piece of a ship so I kind of dig the look they were going for with it. She takes it because free stuff.
She then meets up with her friends Kim, Jen, Donna, and Tiffany at a summer house where they plan to partaaaaaay! Tiffany, who bears a startling resemblance to Scout Taylor-Compton in Rob Zombie's Halloween, instantly bails on them for a hot guy who is washing his car. In what is one in a series of many inexplicably weird scenes in this movie, she has a slow mo montage of her washing his car, which I think is supposed to be sexy, funny, or maybe a satiric combination of both. Anyway, Tiffany is barely in this movie, so let's put a pin in this name for a while. I'll get back to her.
Jill, Kim, Jen, and Donna have a cookout and swim in the pool until someone wonders what fun things they're going to do that night. Jill breaks out the ouija board, because everyone knows there is nothing more fun than communicating with the dead. They instantly make contact with a spirit that says it's bad and hungry, which scares them so they stop playing with the board. That night Jill has bad dreams about a shark and calls her dad and tells him about the ouija board. He warns her not to fool with such things.
We cut to a scene that is somehow even more awkward than the car wash scene, which sees a young couple picnicking in the forest. The boyfriend is really nervous and wants to ask his girlfriend a question. In a normal movie he'd probably be asking her to marry him, but with the way this movie builds it up it seems like he's a virgin and is propositioning her for sex. Whatever the question is, we don't find out, because they're interrupted by the Ouija Shark.
I want to digress a little bit here. Normally in a direct to video shark movie the shark itself is a crappy CGI effect, which is what I expected in this movie. That's not what it is.
It's a puppet. A forced-perspective plush puppet.
It was here that I utterly fell in love with this movie.
Okay, so the Ouija Shark freaks out the couple, and in a moment of hilarity they bail on each other in completely opposite directions. Ouija Shark chases the boyfriend, and we cut to the girlfriend saying "Thank God! It's going after him first!" (I legit lolled). Ouija Shark catches up to the boyfriend and the boyfriend kind of disintegrates in a beam of light. No silly gory death. That's kind of disappointing. But the movie makes it up to us by cutting back to the girlfriend, who is holding this really skinny stick like she's going to smack the Ouija Shark with it. Ouija Shark gets to her before she can use her stick. We cut to a tree, where gory chunks of her slam into it, leaving me with the question of whether Ouija Shark disintegrates his victims or makes them blow up?
We then cut back to the house, where Donna is sitting at the swimming pool, smoking weed. She then sees the Ouija Shark hovering above the pool, and thinks that means she got a good batch. "Here sharky sharky sharky! This is some good shit!" she says before the shark evaporates her. Jill, Jen, and Kim get up not long after and wonder where she is, before realizing she's probably stoned off her ass and wondered off.
Jen goes for a walk too, where she's soon attacked by the Ouija Shark. Nobody notices she's missing nor mentions her for the rest of the movie.
Nobody seems to care where Tiffany's at either, after she snuck off without a word. Has she spent the last twelve hours washing a car or did she get laid? Who knows.
Everyone cares about Donna, nobody else. Everyone loves Donna. Who doesn't love a silly pothead?
The next scene has Jill's dad looking up sharks as mystical animals on the internet and playing with fortune telling cards because of course he has those. What he sees in the cards scares him and he drives off to find his daughter. He also calls to warn her coincidentally just as Jill and Kim just as they turn around and discover Donna's bloody arm in the pool (how they're just now noticing this when they've been next to the pool all morning is anyone's guess).
Jill and Kim scream "DONNA NOOOOOOO!" How they know it's Donna when it's literally just an arm, I don't know. Maybe it's holding a joint. But this is the only death anybody is upset about in this movie, proving Donna is the only character anybody likes.
Ouija Shark then jumps out out of the pool and disintegrates Kim. I just feel like saying that as utterly massive as Kim's jugs are, one day she's going to have severe chronic back pain from holding those puppies in front of her. If anything, Ouija Shark is doing her a favor. Anyway, Jill is like "k bye" and bolts.
Somewhere in here is a subplot about cops looking for the missing couple in the woods. One of them is a competent cop type, the other likes to get drunk and stare at a bartender's boobs. The beer and boob lover gets Ouija Sharked, while the other continues the search.
We then see Jill running through the forest with Tiffany...
Wait...time out, movie. Where the hell did Tiffany come from? I actually rewound the movie to Kim's death scene to make sure I didn't miss anything and...I didn't. When we last saw Jill she was running from the shark alone and when we last saw Tiffany she was sexy car washing at the beginning of the movie. There is no mention of her shacking up with some guy the night before, and she acts like she's always been there. I feel like a scene was left on the cutting room floor where the Ouija Shark ate Tiffany's boy toy and she ran off and bumped into Jill, but nothing is ever stated at all. Tiffany is just there.
Then Ouija Shark eats her.
Great.
What a character arc!
Jill makes her getaway while Ouija Shark munches on her friend, and she bumps into a man wearing a black hooded robe. I can tell the Man in Black is supposed to be handing out exposition on Ouija Shark, but he's mumbling so hard and is ADR'd so poorly I can't tell what the hell he's saying. Fueled with this game changing info about the Ouija Shark (whatever it may be), she loads a gun and takes refuge in a house, where she meets the other cop.
Meanwhile Jill's dad meets a gypsy fortune teller who uses her crystal ball to help him challenge the Ouija Shark. He grabs the crystal ball and acts like Ouija Shark is biting him, then he disappears. "Oh no! I'm dead!" He then communicates with Jill through the ouija board to let her know he's fighting the shark. The scene then switches to him and the Ouija Shark on an astral plane having a total DRAGON BALL Z BATTLE! Don't get too excited, because it's cheap as fuck and dad loses, but holy shit I was not expecting that.
Freshly killing the dad, Ouija Shark goes after Jill and the cop. Jill cocks her gun and says "Fuck you, fish face!" and shoots Ouija Shark. It's dead. That's all it took.
Jill and the cop leave the house sharing witty banter.
Cop: "I could use a drink. You?"
Jill: "I could use about six. And some sushi."
Cop: (has "oof" face) "Too soon!"
Meanwhile, the Man in Black calls up the White House on the phone and tells the President the Ouija Shark was a success. I 100% shit you not, in the end the real villain of the movie is Donald Trump! It doesn't sound like him, and we don't see him directly, but you can tell who it's supposed to be because there are close-ups of his mouth and the actor is airbrushed an orange color. Trump then is ready to execute the next phase of his plan and cackles like a mad man.
The end.
I totally made nothing up.
Given how many cruddy direct to video shark movies there are out there, I expected Ouija Shark to be just another run of the mill one, but I had to see it because I loved the title. Ouija Shark is in several ways better and worse than what those expectations would have lead me to believe this movie was. This movie is way more amateurish than your average direct to video movie (yes, more amateurish than that). In fact, it looks like it was filmed in somebody's back yard when somebody yelled out "Hey! Tell Bob to get his camera! We're going to make something STUPID!"
That's kind of why I like it better than most direct to video shark movies.
Recently on The Last Drive-In, Joe Bob Briggs screened One Cut of the Dead (which is great), and used the entire movie as a set up for this final speech:
Joe Bob's point was it is possible to gain access to the tools you need to make an independent feature and encouraged all aspiring filmmakers to make their own movie and send him the finished product. Ouija Shark seems in line with most of what I think Joe Bob would receive from such a plea. In many ways, it feels like some silly attempt at an amateur movie you'd find on YouTube than a real movie.
The movie is so cheeky though. It feels like it was made by fans of bad movies for fans of bad movies. It feels like a lot of different ones simultaneously: It has the acting of The Room, the filmmaking aspirations of Birdemic, and the editing and continuity of Monster A-Go Go. Self aware bad movies are a dangerous game to play, because it's hard to replicate the lightning-in-a-bottle nature of the best ones. Ouija Shark's attitude toward this seems to be lack of caring what the audience thinks of it, and is more of an exorcise in cast and crew making something dumb that they're enjoying. It genuinely feels like all the actors likely burst out laughing after each take was filmed. That particular vibe of the movie is infectious and I can't help but smile thinking about it.
The last movie I reviewed in this series was Hogzilla, which was a pretty non-movie with shit effects and actors that looked miserable. Ouija Shark is a non-movie with shit effects and actors that look like they're having a blast and doing it just to hang out. They're both bad movies, but I know which one I'd rather watch.
Someone needs to get ahold of Jibbs and have him note this for next year's Academy Awards betting pool, because I think I found next year's easy frontrunner!
Chances are sometime within the next year we'll get endless posts from Dracula, PG Cooper, Doomsday, PhantomKnight, and SnoBorderZero gushing about some bullshit movie about a 80 year old Vietnam Vet dealing with PTSD while going back to college to finish the education he never had; also he's gay and in love with his married teacher, has a college BFF who is in early stages of transition, is half black/half Asian because diversity, and, despite being an American main character in Oklahoma, it's filmed entirely in French with Cantonese subtitles because ART!
At long last I have a real movie I can relate to, firmly establishing what you should do when you find a ouija board on the beach and accidentally unleash a translucent shark that eats all of your friends. Every goddamn summer I deal with this shit and it's nice to finally be acknowledged.
While at the store the other day, something gravitated me to a copy of Ouija Shark, which upon first glance looked like one of those movies Asylum would make for SyFy and makes a profit solely through sales from dickheads with YouTube channels that have less than 200 subscribers who bought the movie only so they can do one of their awful "angry movie review" shtick that everyone else on YouTube does (the smart YouTubers have endless videos of kittens and men getting punched in the balls). Ouija Shark is not one of those movies, surprisingly, though it will likely lead to the same result.
Something was eerily calling me about this DVD. I don't know if it was some higher power guiding me or just the simple fact that I found the title "Ouija Shark" hilarious, but I knew I MUST own this movie. I knew one day I could proudly look back on my life and tell my grandchildren that in the middle of a pandemic where we simultaneously had riots about black people being killed by cops, I was so bored that I purchased a copy of Ouija Shark and loved every fucking minute of it.
The movie starts with a redhead named Jill stopping by a beach, stripping down to her bikini and going for a swim. I want to point out right here how this movie subverts expectations, as most movies like this feature women who are supermodel skinny with abs, but Jill and almost every other female character in the movie is of an average body type that real women can identify with. Jill also has really big, non silicone boobs, as do most of the other women in this movie, so while I want to give the movie points for not conforming to traditionally near impossible body image, I think the director just had a "type."
Anyway, Jill gets into the water and we get an underwater shot that's all yellow and foggy for some reason. Before I can fully try and figure out what the movie's trying to say by the water turning yellow the instant she walks in, she gets spooked by something and runs out of the water, scared. Upon running back onto the beach, she finds a ouija board, which actually looks like a broken piece of a ship so I kind of dig the look they were going for with it. She takes it because free stuff.
She then meets up with her friends Kim, Jen, Donna, and Tiffany at a summer house where they plan to partaaaaaay! Tiffany, who bears a startling resemblance to Scout Taylor-Compton in Rob Zombie's Halloween, instantly bails on them for a hot guy who is washing his car. In what is one in a series of many inexplicably weird scenes in this movie, she has a slow mo montage of her washing his car, which I think is supposed to be sexy, funny, or maybe a satiric combination of both. Anyway, Tiffany is barely in this movie, so let's put a pin in this name for a while. I'll get back to her.
Jill, Kim, Jen, and Donna have a cookout and swim in the pool until someone wonders what fun things they're going to do that night. Jill breaks out the ouija board, because everyone knows there is nothing more fun than communicating with the dead. They instantly make contact with a spirit that says it's bad and hungry, which scares them so they stop playing with the board. That night Jill has bad dreams about a shark and calls her dad and tells him about the ouija board. He warns her not to fool with such things.
We cut to a scene that is somehow even more awkward than the car wash scene, which sees a young couple picnicking in the forest. The boyfriend is really nervous and wants to ask his girlfriend a question. In a normal movie he'd probably be asking her to marry him, but with the way this movie builds it up it seems like he's a virgin and is propositioning her for sex. Whatever the question is, we don't find out, because they're interrupted by the Ouija Shark.
I want to digress a little bit here. Normally in a direct to video shark movie the shark itself is a crappy CGI effect, which is what I expected in this movie. That's not what it is.
It's a puppet. A forced-perspective plush puppet.
It was here that I utterly fell in love with this movie.
Okay, so the Ouija Shark freaks out the couple, and in a moment of hilarity they bail on each other in completely opposite directions. Ouija Shark chases the boyfriend, and we cut to the girlfriend saying "Thank God! It's going after him first!" (I legit lolled). Ouija Shark catches up to the boyfriend and the boyfriend kind of disintegrates in a beam of light. No silly gory death. That's kind of disappointing. But the movie makes it up to us by cutting back to the girlfriend, who is holding this really skinny stick like she's going to smack the Ouija Shark with it. Ouija Shark gets to her before she can use her stick. We cut to a tree, where gory chunks of her slam into it, leaving me with the question of whether Ouija Shark disintegrates his victims or makes them blow up?
We then cut back to the house, where Donna is sitting at the swimming pool, smoking weed. She then sees the Ouija Shark hovering above the pool, and thinks that means she got a good batch. "Here sharky sharky sharky! This is some good shit!" she says before the shark evaporates her. Jill, Jen, and Kim get up not long after and wonder where she is, before realizing she's probably stoned off her ass and wondered off.
Jen goes for a walk too, where she's soon attacked by the Ouija Shark. Nobody notices she's missing nor mentions her for the rest of the movie.
Nobody seems to care where Tiffany's at either, after she snuck off without a word. Has she spent the last twelve hours washing a car or did she get laid? Who knows.
Everyone cares about Donna, nobody else. Everyone loves Donna. Who doesn't love a silly pothead?
The next scene has Jill's dad looking up sharks as mystical animals on the internet and playing with fortune telling cards because of course he has those. What he sees in the cards scares him and he drives off to find his daughter. He also calls to warn her coincidentally just as Jill and Kim just as they turn around and discover Donna's bloody arm in the pool (how they're just now noticing this when they've been next to the pool all morning is anyone's guess).
Jill and Kim scream "DONNA NOOOOOOO!" How they know it's Donna when it's literally just an arm, I don't know. Maybe it's holding a joint. But this is the only death anybody is upset about in this movie, proving Donna is the only character anybody likes.
Ouija Shark then jumps out out of the pool and disintegrates Kim. I just feel like saying that as utterly massive as Kim's jugs are, one day she's going to have severe chronic back pain from holding those puppies in front of her. If anything, Ouija Shark is doing her a favor. Anyway, Jill is like "k bye" and bolts.
Somewhere in here is a subplot about cops looking for the missing couple in the woods. One of them is a competent cop type, the other likes to get drunk and stare at a bartender's boobs. The beer and boob lover gets Ouija Sharked, while the other continues the search.
We then see Jill running through the forest with Tiffany...
Wait...time out, movie. Where the hell did Tiffany come from? I actually rewound the movie to Kim's death scene to make sure I didn't miss anything and...I didn't. When we last saw Jill she was running from the shark alone and when we last saw Tiffany she was sexy car washing at the beginning of the movie. There is no mention of her shacking up with some guy the night before, and she acts like she's always been there. I feel like a scene was left on the cutting room floor where the Ouija Shark ate Tiffany's boy toy and she ran off and bumped into Jill, but nothing is ever stated at all. Tiffany is just there.
Then Ouija Shark eats her.
Great.
What a character arc!
Jill makes her getaway while Ouija Shark munches on her friend, and she bumps into a man wearing a black hooded robe. I can tell the Man in Black is supposed to be handing out exposition on Ouija Shark, but he's mumbling so hard and is ADR'd so poorly I can't tell what the hell he's saying. Fueled with this game changing info about the Ouija Shark (whatever it may be), she loads a gun and takes refuge in a house, where she meets the other cop.
Meanwhile Jill's dad meets a gypsy fortune teller who uses her crystal ball to help him challenge the Ouija Shark. He grabs the crystal ball and acts like Ouija Shark is biting him, then he disappears. "Oh no! I'm dead!" He then communicates with Jill through the ouija board to let her know he's fighting the shark. The scene then switches to him and the Ouija Shark on an astral plane having a total DRAGON BALL Z BATTLE! Don't get too excited, because it's cheap as fuck and dad loses, but holy shit I was not expecting that.
Freshly killing the dad, Ouija Shark goes after Jill and the cop. Jill cocks her gun and says "Fuck you, fish face!" and shoots Ouija Shark. It's dead. That's all it took.
Jill and the cop leave the house sharing witty banter.
Cop: "I could use a drink. You?"
Jill: "I could use about six. And some sushi."
Cop: (has "oof" face) "Too soon!"
Meanwhile, the Man in Black calls up the White House on the phone and tells the President the Ouija Shark was a success. I 100% shit you not, in the end the real villain of the movie is Donald Trump! It doesn't sound like him, and we don't see him directly, but you can tell who it's supposed to be because there are close-ups of his mouth and the actor is airbrushed an orange color. Trump then is ready to execute the next phase of his plan and cackles like a mad man.
The end.
I totally made nothing up.
Given how many cruddy direct to video shark movies there are out there, I expected Ouija Shark to be just another run of the mill one, but I had to see it because I loved the title. Ouija Shark is in several ways better and worse than what those expectations would have lead me to believe this movie was. This movie is way more amateurish than your average direct to video movie (yes, more amateurish than that). In fact, it looks like it was filmed in somebody's back yard when somebody yelled out "Hey! Tell Bob to get his camera! We're going to make something STUPID!"
That's kind of why I like it better than most direct to video shark movies.
Recently on The Last Drive-In, Joe Bob Briggs screened One Cut of the Dead (which is great), and used the entire movie as a set up for this final speech:
Joe Bob's point was it is possible to gain access to the tools you need to make an independent feature and encouraged all aspiring filmmakers to make their own movie and send him the finished product. Ouija Shark seems in line with most of what I think Joe Bob would receive from such a plea. In many ways, it feels like some silly attempt at an amateur movie you'd find on YouTube than a real movie.
The movie is so cheeky though. It feels like it was made by fans of bad movies for fans of bad movies. It feels like a lot of different ones simultaneously: It has the acting of The Room, the filmmaking aspirations of Birdemic, and the editing and continuity of Monster A-Go Go. Self aware bad movies are a dangerous game to play, because it's hard to replicate the lightning-in-a-bottle nature of the best ones. Ouija Shark's attitude toward this seems to be lack of caring what the audience thinks of it, and is more of an exorcise in cast and crew making something dumb that they're enjoying. It genuinely feels like all the actors likely burst out laughing after each take was filmed. That particular vibe of the movie is infectious and I can't help but smile thinking about it.
The last movie I reviewed in this series was Hogzilla, which was a pretty non-movie with shit effects and actors that looked miserable. Ouija Shark is a non-movie with shit effects and actors that look like they're having a blast and doing it just to hang out. They're both bad movies, but I know which one I'd rather watch.
