With just $6,257.34, Bad CGI Sharks does what the underwhelming fin-fronted film The Meg couldn’t do with $130 million: Be incredibly entertaining.
Matt (Matthew Ellsworth) loses his office job when he loses his cool, thanks to receiving after-the-fact news that Mom and Dad have shipped his no-good older brother to California to live with him. Embodying oil to Matt’s water, Jason (Jason Ellsworth) is a perpetually unemployed, possibly lobotomized man-child with a phallic man bun and a lofty dream on which, unlike his buttoned-up bro, he never gave up: to “make it” in Hollywood by finishing Sharks Outta Water, the 15-year-old screenplay they started writing — in longhand, of course — as kids.
Enter our Ricardo Montalban-sounding narrator, the mischievous Bernardo (a scene-stealing Matteo Molinari, The Silence of the Hams), whose magical director’s clapboard makes people’s movie ideas come to life. (Yeah, yeah — don’t ask. Just enjoy.) Suddenly, cheap-looking sharks are floating through Matt’s neighborhood and seeking human-sized snacks. So what if the creatures sometimes suffer rendering glitches while on the hunt?
Effectively writing, directing, producing and editing Bad CGI Sharks as a musketeer-thick trio, Molinari and the Ellsworth siblings turn many a shark flick’s deficiency into their primary selling point, and I’ve got to hand it to them: It’s kinda genius. The guys go so meta, they not only break the fourth wall, but ruin the soil around it so a fifth cannot be constructed. If you find the propulsive drum-and-bass score of the chase scenes self-aware, wait for the chat-show intermission at the one-hour mark.
Although not every actor in their unpaid cast is quite in lockstep, Ellsworth/Molinari/Ellsworth demonstrate a firm grasp on the rhythms of film comedy, both in camera and on the page, resulting in a knowing parody that earns each of its many laughs. Sharksploitation has never looked this good looking this bad. —Rod Lott