D: Paul Tarnopol / 88m

Cast: Danielle Dallacco, Angelica Boccella, Giovanni Roselli, Chris Lazzaro, Nicole Rutigliano, Ashley Mitchell, Christina Scaglione, Brenton Duplessie, Brett Azar, John Michael Hastie, Leonarda Bosch, Ron Jeremy

A group of friends – Teresa (Dallacco), Dina (Boccella), Joanne (Rutigliano), Valerie (Mitchell), and Gigi (Scaglione) – decide to head for the beach for the weekend but a double booking on the place where they’re meant to stay means they end up staying at Teresa’s Uncle Vito’s place on the edge of the Pine Barrens.  They head for the beach anyway, and meet a group of guys – Tony (Roselli), Freddy (Lazzaro), Vinnie (Duplessie), Gino (Azar), and Joey (Hastie) – with similar ambitions for the weekend: to party hard and get laid.  They all head back to Uncle Vito’s where they start to get to know each other better, but there’s a killer on the loose, and he’s hell bent on murdering them all.

Intended as a spoof horror – the spoof element being the characters who bear a strong resemblance to the characters in the TV show, Jersey Shore – Jersey Shore Massacre is  an unsophisticated, deliberately awful parody of that particular show, as well as a fond tribute to various horror movies of the last twenty years (it’s nice to see both Friday the 13th and The Shining being alluded to… as well as many other horror classics).  It makes fun of the show’s conventions, and boasts some unexpectedly funny one-liners as well as a further in-movie spoof entitled Fat Camp Massacre.

But poking fun at a bunch of narcissists will only get you so far, and so it goes here, with a cast who look and sound the part – with the exception of Dallacco who looks like she’s wandered in from another show entirely (one with an IQ requirement that’s in double figures) – but who are as annoying as their small screen counterparts.  Having them killed off in ever more inventive ways goes some way to making the movie more palatable but it’s still riddled with casual sexism and even more casual attempts at acting.

Co-writer/director Tarnopol struggles with the set up and appears undecided as to whether his version of the Jersey Devil should be into torture porn or straight forward slaying, and there’s a shower murder that would have had Hitchcock shaking his head in dismay.  All in all it’s as amateurish as you’d expect, and further proof that just because someone can make a movie, it doesn’t mean they should.

Rating: 3/10 – as bad as it sounds, and good intentions aside, the kind of spoof that works only if the original source isn’t already an example of self-parody; when the cast whine louder than the sander used on one victim, then it’s clear – if the title Jersey Shore Massacre hadn’t convinced anyone already – that this is low budget stuff and less than impressive.