“Ouija Shark” Is What Happens When You Use Mad-Libs for Movie Titles

Brandon Dockery
The Offbeat Movie Emporium
3 min readAug 4, 2020

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Originally I was going to write this little short story in which the director, Brett Kelly, sets out to fulfill his dream of making the best local furniture store commercial the world has ever seen. He would eclipse his more successful cousin, Machine Gun Kelly. However, he loses control of his production as greedy investors demand changes, add shark puppets and random scenes of women in bikinis, etc… It culminates in his work going live on Amazon Prime but Kelly is a broken man.

Then the last 10 minutes of this movie happened and I said fuck it, it’s funnier to just list the various things that happen in this 70-minute icecream-truck fire.

Insofar as this movie has a plot, it’s that 4 or 5 (one disappears for most of the movie) college students use a knock-off Ouija board that washed up in the lake to summon a semi-transparent shark puppet. Several new characters and subplots appear just so the shark has something to eat. After an utterly nonsensical backstory about the final girl’s family being involved with the occult, her ghost dad headbutts the shark and they explode. The shark survives until she shoots the Ouija Board. Finally, it is revealed that the cloaked figure who briefly appeared halfway through the movie to offer some exposition is working with Donald Trump, who engineered the whole thing….Yeah.

This is what happens when you smoke pot, according to this movie.

Having blown the entire special effects budget on a prolonged scene of the missing girl washing some dude’s Honda, shark attack scenes are skipped in favor of flashes of light and a wet spot on the ground where the victims stood. At one point they try to throw some gore into the mix, but it looks like they threw instant pudding against a tree.

Other subplots that go on far too long include:

  1. Conversations between Jill (final girl) and her dad about her family’s history with the occult, only brought up after she calls him to ask about Ouija boards
  2. The world’s most awkward couple goes for a picnic. Completely flustered by the site of the girl in a bikini top, her idiot boyfriend rambles about the hazards of swimming 30 minutes after eating. She celebrates when the shark chases him down first. Armed with a stick, she wanders around talking to the shark until she is also eaten

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Brandon Dockery
The Offbeat Movie Emporium

It’s not about the destination, it’s about complaining every step of the way there. Writing published in Slackjaw, Points in Case, The Haven and Robot Butt