Cult filmmaker Tommy Wiseau, somehow independently wealthy despite not seeming to actually do much of anything besides selling underwear with his name on it alongside The Room DVDs and shirts, has finally, after two decades, put aside enough scratch to self-fund a follow-up feature. (The less said about his documentary short “Homeless in America” and his pseudo-sitcom The Neighbors, the better.) With Big Shark, he’s following a more marketable trend of the low-budget sharksploitation flick, and is roadshow touring it alongside The Room, sometimes on the same night, other times on successive dates.
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In typical Wiseau fashion, it must be said that Big Shark, his second feature as writer/director/everything, bears about as much resemblance to the typical shark movie as The Room did to its oft-advertised “passion of Tennessee Williams.” Unlike, say, Shark Exorcist or Ghost Shark, though, the movie does have the (debatable) value-added element of Wiseau, who delivers exactly what his fans and haters might expect. Which is to say that like The Room, Big Shark is a product of so many bizarrely wrong choices that it transcends any conventional notions of “good” or “bad,” to the point of creating an alternate reality.
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In our reality, the idea of a shark movie in which the three shark hunters repeatedly forget about the task at hand, getting drunk instead, might be a clever comedy premise. Indeed, probably unintentionally, Wiseau has created something akin to a modern Three Stooges movie. The jokes all stem from idiots being in a profession they have no business in, and then fighting with each other more than the actual problem they’re assigned to fix. Wiseau, playing a character improbably named Patrick, leads the team of Tim (Isaiah LaBorde, also of Atomic Shark) and Georgie (Mark Valeriano), firemen who all live in the same Louisiana house with their girlfriends.
As the movie opens, they mug their way through stock footage and cheap digital flames to save two kids, and are rewarded by receiving medals at a ceremony in a movie theater, where, one suspects, a midnight audience for The Room may have been corralled into playing applauding extras. Wearing tuxes and silly hats (LaBorde goes for cowboy, Wiseau dons his Michael Jackson-ish chapeau), they proceed to get incredibly drunk, intervene in a ridiculous random mugging—on the side of the mugger!—and generally argue about their living arrangements and brains.
While on a fishing trip (think The Room’s football scenes, but with rod and reel), Patrick claims to see a shark. Specifically, in his words, “I saw a big shark! Period! AAAH! AAAH! AAAH! AAAH! AAAH!”
Yes, I counted: five “AAAH”s. There’s no visual evidence of this whatsoever, but after many, many more filler scenes of characters being drunk and stupid, digital water starts spontaneously appearing throughout New Orleans, bringing with it a massive, bad-CGI shark which body-surfs it like a Slip ‘N Slide. With the National Guard unavoidably occupied for unspecified reasons, defeating the shark is up to our heroes, whom we know are heroes because every character they encounter calls them that. In some scenes, they prepare for battle. In others, they drink, play pool, or go to bed, because a giant monster eating people across the city simply isn’t urgent.
Big Shark appears to have been assembled out of order, to say the least. Characters change names. Early on, Tim randomly mentions a treasure map–one the characters won’t first encounter for another 45 minutes or so. Transitions between scenes can be abrupt and happen in the middle of line deliveries, while poor sound mixing sometimes makes the volume abruptly change. Some of the dialogue is so weirdly Wiseau-esque it must have been scripted, like Georgie saying, “I’m not aligned with anything you’re saying, Patrick!” or multiple characters repeating the phrase, “You have a delusional brain!” Yet other scenes feel improvised, with the same points reiterated over and over like in the worst conversations you’ve ever had with your parents. In one scene, Wiseau repeatedly mispronounces “probability” as “probolty.”
If Big Shark doesn’t all always cohere as a story, it does fit into the “alien being observes human life, makes himself the hero, and gets it weirdly wrong” subgenre of one (now two) that The Room defined. In that film, Wiseau played perfect human and righteously betrayed teetotaler Johnny; in Big Shark, he’s a romantic screw-up and eternal drunk, and appears to have gone full method on the imbibing. (Admittedly, with his slurry, screamy acting style, it’s hard to tell what exactly the baseline for sobriety might be.) As part of the more predefined shark genre, Big Shark has a better sense of where its story is ultimately going, though it’s still full of the filmmaker’s trademarks, like bizarre subplots that go nowhere—most notably with a Robert Shaw wannabe who seems to be a literal ghost and is never mentioned again after his first appearance.
Clearly, assessing Big Shark by conventional standards is futile. That said, it features a sequence of the guys wrangling up some live pigs to use as bait, only to realize dead pigs will work better, that’s eye-wateringly hilarious, and somehow features impeccable comic timing. Other bits of shtick, like divers plainly not seeing the massive shark swimming behind them, play as more ridiculous than funny. As fans might expect, Wiseau gives himself a Marlon Brando “Stella!” moment that falls absurdly flat, and in a new turn of events, he attempts on several occasions to sing songs that sound half-plagiarized and part-imagined. He’s terrible. Does it matter? Hell no.
Toward the end of the movie—hardly a spoiler—Patrick says, “We saved nation, do you know?” That may be hyperbole, but Big Shark, for a certain segment of the audience, should help preserve a type of theatrical experience that Netflix simply can’t reproduce. (RiffTrax will invariably have their fun, but even they felt stymied by The Room.) The call-and-response isn’t yet as fine-tuned as that of The Room, but the opportunities are ample. At our screening, for one of many examples, when Patrick said, “I’m not good at this,” it was a no-brainer for fans to shout back “We know!” As the movie dragged out its big reveal, a chant of “Where’s the shark?” emerged at every moment of character downtime.
More than anything else this year, Big Shark demands interplay with an audience. Even without Wiseau present—check the online schedule and his social media to check which screenings do and don’t feature an in-person drop-in—Big Shark retains the vibe of The Room’s early days. Once again, the film is as much about the bonding experience with strangers as it is about willingly subjecting yourself to the madness of what’s on the screen.