By Emi Gruender and Mia Hanuska
Welcome back to Groovy Movies, where The Shield writers Emi Gruender and Mia Hanuska scour Amazon Prime’s movie selection to find the most hilariously terrible movies! This episode, we snuggled into the leathery couch cushions for a hopefully Thanksgiving-ish themed movie, Sharks of the Corn.
**Disclaimer: this movie, and thus this article as well, is rated R as it discusses sexually explicit content and not recommended for younger audiences. View at your own discretion**
Episode 3: Sharks of the Corn
★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ — 4/10
This time we did a bit of extra research before watching, and discovered some lovely information about it on IMDB—mainly that it’s rated a whole 1.9 stars out of 10! Hearing this, we were very excited to start watching, especially after seeing the trailer that shows this movie looks like it had a huuuuuge production budget….
Beginning strong, the first words that pop up on the screen are “based on true events,” which worries us after reading the overview and hearing that it’s about sharks swimming… in corn fields. Nonetheless, we ignore the warning and are greeted by a lovely couple eating a post-corn-festival picnic right next to a field of corn. The male in the couple is the important one; his name is Gary and he wears a shirt that says “I’m the bearded man your mom warned you about.” Very menacing indeed.
Gary must’ve decided that the corn festival wasn’t nearly exciting enough as he chugs straight from a liquor bottle (that still has the cap on, of course). His wife doesn’t seem nearly as overjoyed by the idea of spending the entire afternoon drinking and chooses to walk into the cornfield while stripping off all her clothes and throwing them into the corn in a game later referred to as “strip and go seek”—we hope the actress was paid graciously for this role. Four minutes into the movie and one character is already completely naked—what a great start! Oh, and the reason she’s not important? Yeah, she gets viciously mauled not even three minutes later by a shark that comes out of the corn.
Cut to a completely unrelated scene where we watch a mysterious and totally not suspicious man pray in front of an ornate (but definitely not allowed in his motel room) shrine for, you guessed it, sharks. His name, we later discover after he’s detained for telling the police chief he’s a mass murderer, is Teddy, and after saying a couple prayers, leaves his nicely furnished room to find a prostitute—because would it really be an episode of Groovy Movies if there wasn’t a prostitute?
Anyway, he kills this woman in the name of Chichimatul, a Great White Shark goddess that his cult worships. And did we mention, every time the “shark spirit” is evoked, the screen quickly cuts to some stock footage of Stonehenge with lightning in the background? Don’t worry though, Stonehenge plays an important role in the plot despite the film taking place in the middle of nowhere in Kentucky.
As the film progresses, we meet a whole host of larger-than-life characters, including a real-estate agent that exclusively does his work in the middle of the forest, a strong independent police chief, a CIA agent, and two mafia agents aiming to destroy “Chichimatul’s 13th pup.”
Many times throughout the movie, we had to pause and go over what we had just seen. We even recorded a four minute video at the halfway mark, going over what we thought was going on. If The Velocipastor was a 10/10 film, this movie was just genuinely…. bad.
To summarize, since we could barely understand the sequence of events, here are the events that we were able to understand. There are several subplots— including our favorite starring Murray Benchley, a CIA Agent sent to recover the 13th pup of Chichimatul (which is just a plastic shark suspended in a cylindrical container of blue-dyed water) in an empty warehouse decorated only with the plastic skeleton of an alien. As the plot progresses, we witness an innocent 10-year-old boy chase a frisbee into the fields and subsequently get eaten by a corn shark. When two main characters discuss his death, we see a police officer struggle with a wad of police tape as she randomly drapes them across random stalks. We couldn’t even pay attention to the dialogue because we were so entranced by her cluelessness. We also watched two underqualified mafia bosses fly around in a helicopter for half of the movie; the bosses’ headset was literally a handheld microphone taped to his face.
If we thought The Spaghettiman and The Velocipastor were fever dreams incarnate, Sharks of the Corn exceeded our wildest expectations. If you’re in for a baffling hour and 45 minutes, yes you read that right, an hour and 45 minutes, find this interesting movie on Amazon Prime. Not Amazing.com, of course.
OUR FAVORITE QUOTES
- “Based on true events.”
- “Time to kill.”
- “Are you looking to… party, by chance?”
- “Shark scarecrow? Huah!”
- “Make sure to call 1-800- BIGFEET!”
- “Got your license and registration on you?”…. “grrrrr”
- “We’re two decades into the 21st century, there are no good guys anymore, just greycoats.”
- “Then off to the egg beater!!!”
- “Great White Lives Matter”
- “If that’s what you want to call it, then yeah. This is my calling in life!”
- “I am the shark, the predator. I am one with the Great White Goddess Chichimatul”
- “There’s no ozone left”
- “I got it from Amazing.com. They have express four day delivery!” *delivery guy gets eaten by sharks*
- “Straight as a roundabout, ma’am”
- “Sharks in the popcorn! Doggonit!”
- “It’s like Off…but for sharks”
- “A grenade?? Probably from some peaceful protestors”
- “Never go swimming with bowlegged women!”
- “I’ve got a bag full of girly toys that should make a lot of noise”
- “I guess… we did it?”