So Exploitation April comes to an end. Over the course of the month we have talked about some really sleazy parts of exploitation. We talked about the exploitation of a real tragedy with Guyana: Cult of the Damned, exploitation of sex with Schoolgirl Hitchhikers, and gore exploitation with Cannibal Ferox. But today we are going to talk about a new kind of exploitation, a strange new genre that has wormed its way into main stream culture, CGI Exploitation.
For anyone among us who grew up in the past decade, the SciFi channel original movie and movies from the production company The Asylum are fresh in all of our minds. Oh the days when I was a young teenager, sitting in my room eating Lucky Charms, and watching Python 2 or Megaladon vs. Giant Octopus. They were fun, campy, and silly complete with a cast of nobody actors and a cookie cutter plot, 8-10 people show up to location x, monster x shows up, eats the majority of them, and rinse and repeat. But of all the features of these movies, none was more prevalent than the fact that each and every single one of the gigantic fuck off monsters was made of some of the most horrendous CGI to ever grace the tiny screen. I mean, I’ve seen some bad CGI, but this… This looks like it was created straight out of some teenagers photoshop project gone horribly wrong. I watched them all the time and I absolutely loved them. I didn’t care they were the same plot with the same premise, they were goofy, and it was a way to kill time on a Sunday afternoon.
Needless to say that as the years would go on these movies would start to become a little… Self aware. They realized their flaws and realized what they were, cheesy creature feature B Movies. So they started playing into what people like about these movies and the culmination of that is The Asylum’s Sharknado. One part CGI exploitation, 2 parts insanity, and a big ole dosage of self awareness equals out to what is by all accounts the most popular film in the sub genre. Sharknado’s popularity has won it over in the eyes of people, but as we know in movies, popularity DEFINITELY doesn’t equate to value. So let’s take a look at this movie to wrap up Exploitation April. Continue reading “Exploitation April: Sharknado”