Two-Headed Shark Attack

Well, that got tainted for me. Fast.

I'd seen a bit of Six-Headed Shark Attack, loved it, and decided I wanted to see the beginning of the series. So I talked with my brother as we were going on vacation. We wanted to see bad movies and laugh at them. I told him about Six-Headed, how much I liked it, and that I wanted to see the first one in the series. He agreed. Of course my sisters got roped into this whole thing, because why not? It's late at night, and the house is quiet and we could use the laugh.

Oh my goodness. The CGI. Yeah, that's the actual CGI up there. The picture does not do it justice, at all. I mean, I know there's worse CGI out there, but wow. Just wow. Watching two bodacious babes get swallowed whole by this thing was about the most amusing thing I've looked at since... well... Six-Headed Shark Attack! The opening minutes of this movie do not skimp. And it's great.

The acting is so bad, so awful, that it transcends almost all the classifications I can rationally give it. It doesn't help that the dialogue is especially horrendous, with the barest of one-liners and cliches to just give the barest hint of caricatures.

OK, I can't keep this up: I didn't finish the movie.

Here's why.

So throughout the flick the camera kept staying a bit too long on the vapid models, male and female, that they had hired to shoot this travesty. I know that's normal and all that, but this felt different to me. Weird. Predatory. The fact that in a number of shots the models (I really can't call them actors!) were playing it up to the camera, on purpose, did not help.

And yeah, I tried to ignore it. Whatever, right? Bring on the bad CGI sharks, that's what I'm here to see! Yeah, I know, they're probably going to show a little skin or whatever, but I'm not here for that, give me my freaking shark carnage showboating please. 

But right there, with my sisters watching, two of the models took their tops off.

Now, I'm no prude about this sorta thing. I've done life drawing classes, which completely redefine what it means to make comments about someone else's anatomy and not being a skeev while doing it. There is such a thing as tastefully done nudity that doesn't make you feel dirty looking at it. And yeah, it may have had something to do with the fact that my sisters were going "I DIDN'T COME FOR BOOBS I CAME FOR SHARKS" that put me off. But the simple fact of the matter was that the way the scene was shot felt... wrong. There was something to it that put me off in my gut.

So, at the behest of my sisters and my screaming gut, I turned it off.

I won't be coming back to it.

Maybe the other entries in the series are not exploitative. I know the bits of Six-Headed weren't, and I'll happily rewatch that and laugh about how awful that movie was. But Two-Headed Shark Attack felt mean-spirited. And I'm going to have to sit down and figure out why that is. Because I've got questions. Questions that I didn't have before watching the movie.

See, to me shark movies are about the triumph of the spiritual over the carnal. The best shark movie ever made, Jaws, doesn't reveal a whole lot about the protagonists of the movie. In fact, it hardly shows the shark. It focuses on the drama of valuing human life over profits, even if those profits may cause great discomfort.

OK, that's a bit simplified. And rough. But c'mon, Jaws is a freaking classic for a reason. It's what I got for the moment.

Let me try this with another shark movie that's actually good: The Shallows. In it Nancy Adams goes to the beach where her mother had been shortly before giving birth. Nancy does this to feel some sense of connection to her now-dead mother. The shark that attacks Nancy is a female great white, with scars from mating. The movie does not tell you that. But female sharks are always larger than male ones, and if you know anything about shark mating then you know it's bloody.

Yeah, I know the image is "too big". Yeah, it's on purpose.

That image? Right up there? That is what a shark movie is about. The secrets under the surface, the metaphor is very clearly right there, because that is a mama looking to devour a daughter who is trying to create a memory when she should be grieving.

I'm not sure how else to put it, but that image right above is what shark movies are about. Somehow.

Now, as a parody movie I think Two-Headed Shark attack needs to stick to those same rules, even while lampooning them. And lampooning a shark movie is certainly fun and praiseworthy! But I think you should stick to the rules of shark movies, epitomized in Jaws and The Shallows. I won't pretend to really know what those rules are. But they are there. I can feel them. And this movie broke them. Which means you just have a slasher film. I don't want a slasher film with a shark. I want a freaking shark film. And I wish I knew what that meant.

Hm, this may turn into a rabbit hole. We'll see!

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