Jersey Shore Massacre Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		2.5

Jersey Shore Massacre Blu-ray Movie Review

Admit It; You've Always Wanted Them Dead

Reviewed by Michael Reuben August 26, 2014

The latest effort by a member of the cast of MTV's Jersey Shore to prolong their seemingly endless fifteen minutes of fame consists of Jenni "JWoww" Farley lending her name—and apparently nothing else—to the horror comedy Jersey Shore Massacre, which is being released in an all-out blitz on DVD, Blu-ray, video-on-demand and, no doubt for the sake of credibility, a few theater screens. The writer and director is Paul Tarnopol, whose only other listed credit is as the producer of Girls Gone Dead, the previous feature made by the company bringing Jersey Shore Massacre to your screen. In the "Behind the Scenes" included in the extras, Tarnopol intones, in a robotic voiceover characteristic of the wooden performances he elicits from his cast, that "guidos" and "guidettes" were part of his everyday life long before shows like Jersey Shore and The Sopranos and that the idea of incorporating them into a horror comedy was "impossible for me to resist".

Whatever Tarnopol may have been thinking (and it probably had a dollar sign in front of it), a slasher film in which a deranged killer hacks up stand-ins for the likes of Snooki, JWoww, Pauly D and The Situation has an inevitable logic. For six seasons, these wanton morons became staples of pop culture simply by making anyone who tuned in feel better about themselves. No matter what mistakes you made in life, they made you feel smart, because you couldn't possibly be that dumb. Unfortunately, the attraction wore off as dumbness proved to be good business, and these stupid reality stars laughed all the way to the bank. Offering up surrogates of such pop culture lotto winners for torture and butchery is just the next logical step in feeding the public's appetite. Enter Tarnopol and his co-screenwriter, who goes by the pseudonym "Goldeneye".

Everything about Jersey Shore Massacre has a cheesy, direct-to-video aesthetic, and not in a way that indicates the filmmakers were aiming for something higher and simply had trouble getting adequate funding. No, this is the style of so-called "reality TV", which itself has its roots in porn, where the characters are one-dimensional (yes, that's less than two-dimensional), the performances are so broad that even vaudeville would balk, and the jokes are about as subtle as someone pooping in the ocean for another tourist to step on (that actually happens, and just in case anyone in the audience misses the gag, a kid cries out, "Poopie!").

In the opening setup, a trio of wise guys disposing of a body in the Pine Barrens encounter a large figure who may or may not be the legendary "Jersey Devil". The encounter doesn't end well for the mobsters. But that's all the bloodshed that Jersey Shore Massacre has to offer for a long while. The next forty minutes or so are occupied by a lengthy buildup featuring the adventures of six "guidettes" led by Teresa (Danielle Dallacco) and Dina (Angelica Boccella), friends and fellow hairdressers who have gathered a group for a weekend at a house that Dina has rented. The others are named Gigi, Valerie, Joanne and Candi, and one of them has a cousin named Rosemarie who shows up eventually, but what difference does it make who's who? They all have big hair, nails-on-chalkboard voices, and they're collectively as bright as a small appliance bulb.

Trouble starts when the house they think they've rented has been double-booked by the perpetually stoned owner named Ronny, played by porn star Ron Jeremy, who looks appropriately dissolute now that he's in his sixties. So Teresa takes them all to the remote country estate on the edge of the Pine Barrens owned by her Uncle Vito, the crime boss for whom the unfortunate mobsters in the opening used to work. Uncle Vito can't use the place because he's under house arrest in Staten Island awaiting trial. (According to Tarnopol, the production wanted Vincent Pastore of The Sopranos to make a cameo as Uncle Vito, but the former "Big Pussy" was, ahem, unavailable. Translation: They couldn't afford him.)

After wasting their time (and ours) on a tour of the Pine Barrens, where we get the tale of the Jersey Devil, and after meeting their strange neighbor, Edgar (Mark E. Shaw, under the stage name "Bigfoot"), the guidettes finally meets their guidos, first at the beach, then at a local club. Eventually, they get back to the house, where swimming, sex and slaughter commence. There's nothing original here, but the makeup effects (by Cat Bernier) are adequate, even though Tarnopol doesn't always set them up adequately. A scene with a wood chipper doesn't work, because Tarnopol fails to establish the presence of the device, and the obligatory sequence where survivors discover their friends gruesomely murdered loses momentum, because the director often fails to frame the "reveals" for maximum shock. The resolution and twist regarding the killer's identity are so badly rushed that I suspect a lot of viewers will miss it altogether—not that the plot really matters. Questioned about motivation, the killer answers, simply: "It's a Jersey thing." I leave it for residents of the Garden State to decide whether or not it's progress that just invoking the name of a region perpetually mocked by every comic to the north is now considered sufficient explanation for homicidal mania.

Jersey Shore Massacre Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Jersey Shore Massacre is the first Blu-ray release from Attack Entertainment, and as with many independents, Attack's first Blu-ray shows that they have a lot to learn about the format. Fortunately for the consumer, the production was shot digitally (using Red cameras, to judge from the "Behind the Scenes" footage), so that at least as far as the video image is concerned, Attack's rookie mistakes haven't hurt them too badly.

When was the last time you saw a Blu-ray encoded with MPEG2? Such discs were common in the early days of the format, when advanced codecs like AVC and VC-1 were still being perfected, but today there is no excuse for using this dated format on a Blu-ray, except to cut corners. Indeed, both the disc's menu design and its stunted audio tracks suggests that the Blu-ray of Jersey Shore Massacre is as close to a straight port of the DVD as one can possibly make. Maybe consumers as ignorant and undiscriminating as the characters in the film wouldn't care, but it's worth pointing out that they watch DVD. Blu-ray buyers tend to expect more, e.g., advanced codecs, lossless sound and enough attention paid to indicate that a Blu-ray was made by someone who gives a $%^# about quality (to put it in language that executive producer JWoww should understand).

Despite primitive encoding, the 1080p, MPEG2-encoded image is quite decent, no doubt because cinematographer Jay Shropshire (making his first feature) wasn't trying for anything subtle. You can see the characters; you can see their clothing, hair and faces; you can see the guys' muscles; you can see the fake blood when it starts to flow; and the killer's face and figure remain obscured until it's time for them to come into the light. Blacks are reasonably black, other colors look natural (as natural as anything in New Jersey), and the only portion of the film that looks dim and stylized is the mock horror film, Massacre at Camp Fat, which the gang watches to pass the time (and which is framed at 1.78:1, compared to the main film's 2.32:1).

One thing that Attack got right: They used a BD-50, although they left a lot of the available space empty. The average bitrate is 24.93 Mbps, which is good enough for digitally acquired material, although the less efficient MPEG2 codec might have benefitted from less compression.

Jersey Shore Massacre Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 audio at the DVD-standard rate of 448 kbps? A Blu-ray that defaults to the stereo track unless you manually select 5.1? Did we just timewarp back to 2006? Memo to Attack Entertainment: If you want to be taken seriously as a Blu-ray producer, lossless audio is essential. That means re-encoding your master tracks as either PCM 5.1, Dolby TrueHD 5.1 or DTS-HD MA 5.1. Anything less, and most Blu-ray buyers won't give you a second look (or listen).

That being said, I doubt that lossless would bring much more enjoyment (if that's the right word) to the experience of hearing Jersey Shore Massacre. How much more shrill and annoying can the ladies' voices get? How much dumber can the guys grunt? How much more (or less) synthetic can the score by David James Rosen (a contributor to various TV shows) sound as it fills in the scene transitions? How much better can the victims scream? The soundtrack for Jersey Shore Massacre is a no-frills affair done fast and on the cheap. Maybe if they knew it would be encoded in a lossless format, they'd take more time with it.

Jersey Shore Massacre Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Fat Camp Massacre (Part 1) (1080p; 1.78:1; 10:16): This is an excerpt from the mock horror film watched by the gang during the movie. I confess that I couldn't survive the entire 10-minute duration.



• Behind the Scenes (1080p; 1.78:1; 24:00): More entertaining than the film itself, this documentary captures the free-for-all atmosphere of a low-budget film in which the actors are much more interesting than their characters and are clearly just happy to be working. (Danielle Dallacco's lengthy impression of the DP is funnier than anything in the film.) The film looks like it was much more fun to make than it is to watch.



• Italian Ice "Melt" (1080p; 1.78:1; 5:40): Italian Ice is a failed rapper who performs (badly) at the club where the guidettes meet their guidos. This is the full version of his signature tune, with assistance from the cast.



• Bigfoot "Unmedicated" (1080p; 1.78:1; 5:21): After actor Mark E. Shaw returned home to Vermont, he began leaving increasingly unhinged messages on director Tarnopol's answering machine. This is a selection. If it's a put-on, it's well performed.



• Coming Soon (1080p; 2.35:1; 1:35): The trailer for Girls Gone Dead, which also plays at startup. "Just when you thought it was safe to go topless."



• Kingnyne "Outta My Head" (1080p; 2.35:1; 4:32): A video for another song heard in the film.

Jersey Shore Massacre Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Having made fair sport of Jersey Shore Massacre, I have to offer a confession. I put the Blu-ray into the player late at night fully expecting to fall asleep while watching, so that I'd have to rewatch some part of it the next day. Instead, I remained alert for the entire running time. Like the TV show that inspired it, the film is weirdly fascinating in its awfulness, like one of John Waters' early works (but with far more pretension) or prestige trash like Showgirls (but with far less). In years gone by, it's the kind of thing I might have watched with a group of intoxicated friends while we all yelled at the TV screen. That doesn't make it a good movie, but it's something. I don't offer that as a recommendation. What consenting adults watch in the privacy of their own home is between them and their Blu-ray player.