Monthly Archives: August 2018

Let’s Talk About Nightmare Shark (dir by Griff and Nathan Furst)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Right now, we’re in the middle of SyFy’s Sharknado week.  On Sunday night, SyFy will premiering what they say is going to be The Last Sharknado.  In the days leading up to that moment, they’ve been reshowing all of their classic shark films and premiering a new shark film each night!

Thursday night’s premiere was Nightmare Shark!

Nightmare Shark kind of swam out of nowhere on Thursday and it ended up impressing the Hell out of not only me but almost everyone that I was watching it with.  There’s a neat little twist to Nightmare Shark, one that will be appreciated and loved by anyone who watches SyFy shark films.  In fact, it’s such a wonderful twist that I don’t want to ruin it for those of you who haven’t seen the film yet.  At the same time, I really can’t review the movie without revealing the details of the twist.

So, consider this to be your SPOILER WARNING!  If you haven’t seen Nightmare Shark, just take my word for it that it’s a scary and effective SyFy shark film and stop reading.  Because what follows is going to spoil a huge part of the film for you.  Here, I’ll give you a few minutes to navigate away from the page before I continue.

Here’s a picture of a cute kitty that the rest of us can look at while you leave:

Okay, let’s continue.

Shared cinematic universes are all the rage right now.  In fact, SyFy already has one of its own.  Ian Ziering making a cameo appearance in Lavalantula established that both that film and its sequel took place in the same chaotic universe as Sharknado.  Well, Nightmare Shark established a second cinematic universe.

The film itself deals with a group of shark attack survivors who, having been plagued by shark-related nightmares, agree to take part in an experimental drug trial.  What they don’t suspect is that the outwardly benevolent Dr. Novak (Tony Amendola) actually worships a Hawaiian shark god and his plan is to use them and their nightmares as a way to bring the shark out of their dreams and into the real world.  Among the survivors are Jolene (Lulu Jovovich) and Rob (Thomas Ian Nicholas) and Gina (Rachele Brooke Smith) and Kaplan (Bobby Campo).  Fans of SyFy shark movies will immediately recognize them as the protagonists of, respectively, Trailer Park Shark and Atomic Shark.

So, there you go.  All three of these films take place in the same universe and personally, I would toss Ghost Shark in there as well.  (The Hawaiian shark god definitely seemed to have a bit in common with the Ghost Shark.)  Just as there’s a Sharknado Cinematic Universe, there’s also a Griff Furst Cinematic Shark Universe.

That was a wonderful Easter egg for all of us longtime fans of SyFy shark week.  Since, with the Sharknado franchise wrapping up, this could be the final shark week, Nightmare Shark also gave us a final chance to spend some time with some of our favorite shark movie protagonists.  Unfortunately, not all of them survive their nightmares.

Compared to the whimsical tone that’s present in most SyFy shark movies, Nightmare Shark was a seriously dark film.  Make no mistake about it, this was definitely a horror film.  In fact, it featured some of the most effective jump scenes that I’ve seen in a SyFy film.  The nightmares were all nicely realized and properly surreal.  The film did a good job of keeping viewers off-balance.  You were never quite sure who was awake or asleep and you spent most of the film looking for little clues at to whether we were seeing the real world or the dream world.  Though the film’s influences were clear — A Nightmare on Elm Street was a big one — Nightmare Shark still did a great job of establishing its own wonderfully twisted identity.  Among the cast, the clear stand-out was Tony Amendola, who was enjoyably sinister as Dr. Novak.

Nightmare Shark was an effective horror film, one that proved that there’s still new twists and scares to found in shark week.

Music Video of the Day: Freeway of Love by Aretha Franklin (1985, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

From an episode of Good Times:

“I didn’t know Benjamin Franklin was on the hundred-dollar bill!”

“Who did you think was on it?”

“Aretha Franklin!”

 Of course, Aretha Franklin was never on the hundred-dollar bill but maybe she should have been.  The singer, who earned the title Queen of Soul, was one of the most influential artists of her time.  When she died yesterday at the age of 76, tributes flowed in from other musicians who were proud to say that she was one of the people who had first inspired them to sing.  Aretha Franklin paved the road that so many other artists have followed.

One of her biggest hits was Freeway of Love, which is also today’s music video of the day.  Appropriately, the video was filmed almost entirely in Detroit, the home of Motown.  Portions of the video were also filmed at Doug’s Body Shop in Ferndale, Michigan.

Keep an eye out for Clarence Clemons and his saxophone.

RIP, Aretha Franklin.

Weekly Reading Round-Up : 08/12/2018 – 08/18/2018, More From David Tea

Posted on by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)'s avatarRyan C.'s Four Color Apocalypse

This week’s Round-Up is going up early because this weekend, which is when I usually writing these things, is all about Autoptic 2018, the latest iteration of the Twin Cities’ premier bi-annual small press comics/indie publications show, and so I’m going to be too damn busy buying and reading a whole bunch of new comics to have any time to write about them. Fortunately, I’ve got plenty of good stuff to talk about already this week thanks to Minneapolis’ own David Tea, who was very appreciative of my review of his Five Perennial Virtues #2 — so appreciative, in fact, that he hooked me up with some more of his comics, and I supplemented his generous “donation to the cause” by reading a couple others that he has available via Amazon. Let’s have a look :

Magic Horses is a bumper-sized reprint volume of issues five and seven of 

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Let’s Talk About Frenzy (dir by Jose Montesinos)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Right now, we’re in the middle of SyFy’s Sharknado week.  On Sunday night, SyFy will premiering what they say is going to be The Last Sharknado.  In the days leading up to that moment, they’ve been reshowing all of their classic shark films and premiering a new shark film each night!

Wednesday night’s premiere was Frenzy.

Frenzy‘s a bit different from some of the other shark films that SyFy’s been showing this week.  Make no mistake, the film did feature sharks.  In fact, there were three very big sharks who swam through the ocean and ate just about anyone or anything that they could sink their teeth into.  Not only did they eat people who were unfortunate enough to be floating out in the water but they also bumped up against boats, the better to knock poachers overboard.  These were some mean sharks!

That said, they weren’t ghost sharks.  They weren’t zombie sharks.  None of them wore a little Santa cap on their fin, like Santa Jaws did.  They weren’t mutated by radiation or a Big Evil Corporation.  And certainly, they weren’t dropped into the ocean by a tornado.  No, these were just normal, very big sharks.

And while the sharks were undoubtedly important to the story that Frenzy was telling, the film really wasn’t about them.  Instead, at its heart, Frenzy is the story of two sisters, Paige (Gina Vitori) and Lindsey (Aubrey Reynolds).  Paige has always been the adventurous one while Lindsey has always been the one who rarely takes risks and who tries to play it safe.  Paige has found fame as a travel vlogger.  Along with Evan (Michael S. New), Kahia (Lanett Tachel) and Seb (Taylor Jorgensen), she travels around the world and she films herself doing dangerous things and having new experiences.  When Lindsey joins Paige for her latest adventure, it seems like a chance for Lindsey to not only break out for her shell but to also find romance with Seb as well…

Of course, things never go quite as smoothly as they’re supposed to.  In this case, things go downhill as soon as Paige, Lindsey, and everyone else gets aboard a less-than-reliable seaplane so that they can go scuba diving.  When the plane crashes into the middle of the ocean, Lindsey and a few survivors are left floating in the water.  There’s an island in the distance but can they reach it before the sharks reach them?

Frenzy was definitely a change-of-pace, as far as SyFy shark movies are concerned.  While I wouldn’t say that you necessarily have to have a sister to truly appreciate Frenzy‘s story, it undoubtedly helps.  The relationship between Paige and Lindsey — made up of equal parts love and rivalry — is at the heart of Frenzy and fortunately, both Aubrey Reynolds and Gina Vitori were totally believable as sisters.  Their relationship, with all of its complications, felt real and, on a personal level, there were many lines of dialogue and little actions to which I related.  For me, as I watched, this film could have just as easily been called “Lisa And Erin Go On Vacation And Try Not To Die.”

I also liked the way that the film used its flashback structure.  With Lindsey continually flashing back between the past and the present, we were kept off-balance as far as Lindsey’s current mental state was concerned.  It’s a structure that required us to consider what was real, what was dreamed, and what was just a hallucination.

Frenzy was a nice change-of-pace for Sharknado week.

Music Video of the Day: I Said Hi by Amy Shark (2018, dir by Nick Waterman and Amy Billings)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

To quote Amy Shark, this song is “an anthem for anyone who is waking up everyday fighting for what they believe in and challenging the universe!”

(For the record, Amy Billings and Amy Shark are one in the same.)

Enjoy!

How To Read “How To Be Alive”

Posted on by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)'s avatarRyan C.'s Four Color Apocalypse

Toward the tail end of 2017 — yeah, I know, I’m still playing a little bit of “catch-up” here and there, sue me — the always-interesting Retrofit Comics/Big Planet Comics publishing co-venture released one of the more thoroughly engrossing books of the year, cartoonist/painter Tara Booth’s How To Be Alive, but no matter how many times I’ve perused its contents, either casually or with serious intent (it lends itself quite nicely to either approach, although the latter will always be more rewarding, of course), I haven’t been able to wrap my head around the best way to review it. Finally, after one complex, slowly-developing emotional reaction to it after another, I seemed to arrive back at where I started with it, and that’s when it sunk in : this was Booth’s point all along.

If there’s beauty to be found in the mundane, this comic offers the surest evidence…

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Let’s Talk About Santa Jaws (dir by Misty Talley)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, about twenty minutes into the latest SyFy shark movie, I declared the following on twitter:

51 favs and 15 retweets later, I stand by my declaration.  Sorry, Jaws.  Step aside, Deep Blue Sea.  It’s been fun, Sharknado 5.  Santa Jaws is officially the greatest shark movie ever made.

The scene in question took place on Christmas Eve.  Lovable Poppa (Ritchie Montgomery) is fishing out on the bayou and drinking from his thermos of eggnog when, suddenly, a shark jumps out of the water and eats him.  It happens rather suddenly, so suddenly in fact that you only barely notice the fact that the shark has red eyes.  It’s only as the shark is swimming away that we see that Santa’s hat is sitting on its fin.  And, if we listen really carefully, we can hear the sound of jingling bells.

From the minute that people learned that SyFy was going to be broadcasting a movie called Santa Jaws, the question became just how literally we should take the title.  Would Santa actually be a shark?  Or would it just be a shark movie that happened during the Christmas season?  And there was one question in particular that we were all wondering:

https://twitter.com/ggfletcher/status/1029438582447132673

Well, the answer is yes.  Santa Jaws does take place during the Christmas season.  While Santa Jaws may not literally be Santa-turned-into-a-shark, he still brings a family together, just like any visit from Santa should.  And yes … the shark wears a Santa hat on his fin.

The film deals with Cody (Reid Miller), a teenage outcast and comic book artist.  Cody is not having a great holiday season.  Not only is there no snow on the ground (the film does take place in Louisiana, after all) but his family seems to be more proud of his athletic older brother, Josh (Arthur Marroquin), than of him.  On top of everything else, he’s been grounded because of a less-than flattering picture that he drew of his school’s principal.  Cody’s mood would probably improve if he knew that his next door neighbor, Jena (Courtney Lauren Collins), is also into comics but Cody can’t even work up the courage to speak to her.

Cody, however, has received one early Christmas present.  Poppa gives him a magic pen, which a frustrated Cody uses to draw a picture of Santa Jaws while complaining about how he wishes his family would just go away.  Cody, of course, doesn’t mean what he says.  Anyone who has ever been a teenager and who has ever had a bad day will immediately understand that.  However, the magic pen doesn’t understand that and soon, Santa Jaws has not only come to life but it’s after Cody’s family!

Now, you may be getting the feeling that Santa Jaws is not meant to be taken too seriously and, in that case, you would be correct.  As far as Misty Talley shark movies are concerned, Santa Jaws has more in common with the cheerful meta comedy of Mississippi River Sharks than the dark horror of Zombie Shark.  With the exception of one unfortunate elf who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, there’s not a lot of blood in Santa Jaws.  However, there are plenty of puns, courtesy of Cody’s best friend, Steve (Hawn Tran).  (My favorite was when Steve said that the shark was “gill-ty.”)  This is the type of film where, when the comic book store owner (Scott Allen Perry), gets his hands on the pen, he promptly draws a Russian girlfriend, a nice car, and several million dollars.  Though a lot of people are eaten over the course of Santa Jaws, neither the film nor the characters lose their sense of humor.

It’s a fun movie and on that delivers exactly what it promises and a whole lot more.  It’s a film that gives you a shark with a Santa hat on its fin but it also delivers clever dialogue and committed performances.  Reid Miller and Courtney Lauren Cummings are likable protagonists and Hawn Tran and Scott Allen Perry provide effective comedic relief.  Arthur Marroquin turns big brother Josh into a nicely rounded character while Jim Klock, Carrie Lazar, Miles Doleac, Haviland Stillwell, and Ritchie Montgomery all have a good moments as the members of Cody’s family.  In the end, you really do hope that the family will still manage to have a merry Christmas.

And, of course, there’s the shark.  The shark loves Christmas, as we all do.  The shark has glowing red eyes, the better to guide your sleigh at night.  And yes, the shark wears a Santa cap on its fin.

Santa Jaws was a lot of fun and I’m hoping SyFy will be smart enough to show it every Christmas.  At the very least, we need a sequel.  Santa Jaws Conquers The Martians, anyone?