In the mid-70's a young film director, Steve, who has had some success making made-for-TV movies gets his first chance to direct a big budget feature film.  Since the film, about a giant shark terrorizing an ocean resort, is similar to a TV movie he made about a monstrous truck, Steve thinks the film will practically shoot itself.  That is until he takes his good friend and fellow film maker George to see the mechanical shark that is going to be the star of the film.  While trying ti out, they badly damage the mechanical prop, and now Steve has to shoot his monster movie without a monster.

This slightly less than half-hour parody of Steven Spielberg's creation of Jaws is fairly amusing.  The film is filled with a lot of little in-jokes that are fun to look for.  The sound the keypad makes as Steven punches in the access code to open the prop storage room and the reason he uses a red pen (it's better than the color purple) make this short fun for film buffs.

The problem with the film is that there isn't anything else.  Just about all of the humor comes from in-jokes about Spielberg's films, and there are only so many times you can have Steve say the name of a Spielberg film and have it be humorous.

There really aren't any laugh-out-loud moments in the movie.  When the shark gets broken for example, it is telegraphed so far in advance that it isn't funny when it does happen.  The fact that George Lucas is portrayed as a nerdy geek is amusing, but not something that has audiences rolling on the floor.  The portrayal of Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss were likewise well done, but lacked real comic impact.

One aspect of the movie that is worth mentioning is that it is beautifully shot.  The cinematography is excellent.  The producers decided to use actual film for this movie, rather than recording it digitally, and the results are worth the extra expense.  The whole film looks very nice.

The stereo soundtrack fits the film well.  Being dialog based there isn't a lot of need for a wide dynamic range, but it is easy to hear the actors and the sound effects.  There isn't any hiss or distortion, nor are there any subtitles.

Video:

The widescreen image wasn't anamorphically enhanced, but it still it looked very good for an independent film.  They wisely decided to shot this on film instead of digitally, and it is easy to see the difference.  Digital defects are practically nonexistent, and the image is very sharp and bright.

Extras:

This disc sports a good amount of bonus material.  First there is a three minute reel of home movies that were taken for actor Kahil Dotay that shows the filming of the show.  There is a six minute montage of production photos, three minutes worth of screen tests, and a minute long reel of storyboards.  The extras are rounded off by a short behind the scenes look at creating the rain for one scene and a trailer.

Final Thoughts:

While there are a lot of lines and moments that are cute in this parody, the film just lacks punch.  I spent most of the movie waiting for a big laugh that never came.  There are some amusing moments, just not a lot of big laughs.  Fans of Spielberg's will enjoy counting how many titles of his films they worked into the script and other inside jokes, but if you've never scene Jaws or are familial with the story behind its filming, this won't work very well.  (Granted that is probably a fairly small group.)  Definitly worth checking out once, but probably not a lot of replay value.  Rent it.