Rocks Reviews: Ouija Shark

Starring:

Director: Brett Kelly

Streaming on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xeln-xbzw7o

Who can forget the day that they first watched Withnail & I. Withnail and the titled character musing upon life as that Hammerhead Shark serves them tea. Or the Shawshank Redemption when Tom Hanks crawls through a river of shit underneath his carefully crafted tunnel and reaches the end of the tunnel where he shares a hug with a basking shark. Or even the Oscars controversy in 2017 where La-La Land was mistakenly named best film, to be replaced by that Biopic of Roger the Shark?

It has also often been said that the daddy of all shark films, Jaws, isn’t actually about the titular creature. And they would be right. Because if it was about the shark and it’s actiung abilities it would be dogshit. Quite apart from the fact that it was a giant-mecha structure that was legendarily problematic, Shark cannot act. So why would one choose to make a fucking film about one?

I have a list of questions like this that I would wish to ask the director of this film — Brett Kelly — should I ever have the misfortune of meeting him. Because I spent 70 minutes on this fucking film which I can never ever get back, and I spent large portions of it devising increasingly ludicrous acts of torture for anyone who was involved in this.

This might feel unnecessary. No one is going to proclaim this film as anything other than dogshit. But there should be a joy in making a film in some way shape or form. I’ll admit that retrospectively I admire the utter-cocaine-fest that is Double-Team in the fact that clearly the scriptwriters kept daring each other to put increasinly bonkers events into the script and they did it all without a single bit of intervention. Double-Team has a massive amount of balls. This has no balls. This film is a fucking Eunech.

We open on a credits sequence that screams “Coming up on the History Channel at 01:05 — Did the Nazi’s come up with the template for the modern contemporary Allotment structure” and gets less interesting from there. A teenage girl goes swimming and after some underwater camerawork which resembles someone operating a camera with their mouth whilst being slapped in knees with a toffee hammer, a plank of wood with some numbers and letters on it lands next to her. The titular board of Ouija.

Anyway, this becomes a group of 5 girls staying at a house together, with a pool. They say phrases like “You’re not my real mum” and “I’ll get it lit — I’m sure you will” with the delivery standards of a meth-addled Hermes driver.

To say that none of them can act isn’t fair. They’re being asked to deliver lines of dialogue throughout this film that eminated from a pen made entirely of farts, and it isn’t helped that they all have to spend an uncomfortable amount of time in Bikinis. Pretty much every scene seems to have an excuse for this — washing a car, ‘catching some rays' despite being in the middle of a forest in the shade, or to look into a swimming pool (not get into it, to observe it). The director seems to have pitched the characters somewhere between ‘Showgirls’ and softcore pornography — which is fucking excruciating to watch.

You can probably guess where it all goes. After a scene using the Ouija board where you have to guess what they’ve said given they use a pointer on the board that is the same size as a slice of fucking pizza, the ghost of an evil shark turns up.

Quality wise, imagine the guys at Fyre Festival tried to copy the Tupac hologram.

You can probably guess what happens. Ghost shark comes along and starts picking them off one by one, in places that sharks can definitely go. Like Forests. And landlocked swimming pools. And it can either maim its victims into a million tiny pieces, or literally make them disappear.

We get to go on a wild ride of dads reading Tarot cards printed off on a xerox machine and a policeman who gives a performance that amateur dramatic veterans would describe as “a bit hammy” as the shark adds to its victims. There’s even time for another policeman to look down a barmaid’s top — then get eaten in a stairwell while he tries to have a sneaky piss.

Honestly, if you’ve spent money making this film, you’d have been better off donating it to funding the counting of grains of sand. At one point near the (merciful) end, two characters duck down behind a tree to hide from the ghost shark, which promptly flies over them. Yes this is an actual thing that I had to witness with my own eyes. And it only gets more fucking preposterous in perhaps the worst ending to a film ever conceived by someone not on life support — all I’ll say is Sharks burping fireballs at ghosts before a twist that I definitely didn’t see coming — because what the actual fuck.

I cannot fathom why you would make this film. If you wanted to make it so bad its funny it has to actually carry an ounce of warmth, rather than probably acting as a vehicle for the director to get into a relationship with a problematic age-difference that he probably leaves after two years due to messaging women on snapchat about being the star of ‘Ouija Shark vs Boobzilla’.

The soul of this film is so dark it would make Werner Herzog cry tears of pure obsidian as he looks upon it.

It has ZERO merits. ZERO.

And no. I will not be reviewing the sequel.

I’m sorry Double-Team. All is forgiven.

Positives: None

Negatives: Everything. Ever.

Rating: Fucking don’t.