Sharknado Review

Warning (?): Spoilers for Sharknado abound here.  Suffice to say spoiler free, if you want a perfect movie for good bad movie night, look no further.

Most movies that fall into the “so bad it’s good” category tend to be ones made by people who think they’re making masterpieces, but completely fail to deliver on every level; the filmography of Ed Wood or The Room for examples.  Then you get Sharknado, the latest in Syfy’s original movies, a film that blew up Twitter with its ridiculous title as the premise.  A movie that’s well aware it is no budget schlock, but embraces what it is and takes it to its extreme.  The film is poorly directed, edited, acted and written, with special effects that are better suited for a Nintendo 64 game than a movie.  And, like many good bad movie fans, I loved every awful, stupid minute of it.

To explain the plot reminds me of the “disclaimer” before Huck Finn, but I’ll make an attempt anyway: surfer Fin—yeah, it’s that movie—tries to make his way to his wife and daughter and later on son amidst a massive storm that deposits sharks throughout Los Angeles via the eponymous sharknado.  Tagging along are his best friend, a waitress that’s feels like is supposed to be Fin’s love interest until they decide to make her Fin’s son’s love interest & John Heard, who I’m pretty sure is actually drunk as his character is, wondering how he wound up in a movie with Tara Reid and Ian Ziering.  Throughout the film he has this bizarre compulsion to stop what he’s doing and save random strangers, including one scene where he must’ve spent several hours lifting one by one an entire busload of kids driven by Cousin Oliver from the Brady Bunch.  That’s about as much character development as you’re going to get, and the plot doesn’t fare much better.

This is a film that not only completely disregards the rules of gravity and physics, but also how humans, the world, weather and movies generally function.  Here’s just a few examples of ridiculous things that happen in this film:

·         A shark attack early on in the film is juxtaposed with stock footage of people at a day at the beach hanging out like nothing’s wrong. 

·         They didn’t bother putting in background in the scenes where the characters are driving or in a helicopter, so everything outside the vehicles is white.

·         Sharks pounce on people like cougars and devour them in seconds or in one case, swallows a few whole without biting them at all.

·         A house, on a hill no less, floods and by doing so collapses.

·         A car randomly explodes for no reason. 

·         This whole thing is blamed on global warming (needless to say scientific accuracy isn’t a concern). 

·         The pointless prologue about fisherman looking to get in the business of shark fin soup with a buyer who just happens to be there.   

·         An airplane tarmac has a home supply store just next door to the hangar. 

·         A Ferris wheel rolls through a city and smashes into a large office building, destroying the building. 

It’s tempting to write this review entirely in italics and in exclamation points because of its relentless insanity.

Oh, it gets crazier.  Rather than, say bunker down in a shelter to avoid the tornadoes filled with sharks, Fin and his crew decide to fight the sharks using shotguns and handguns.  This movie had to have been a zombie tornado initially, but they just search and replaced zombie with shark right?  Zombie tornado must be in the pipeline.  Somehow they are able to kill sharks with handguns from the ground, but it doesn’t stop there.  Even after all of that, Fin decides he and his family need to fight the tornados using homemade bombs.  They even use chainsaws that slice through these sharks like a hot knife through butter, one doing so from the inside.

Movies that are “so bad it’s good” generally are made by people who lack the self-awareness that they’re making a bad movie.  However, there are a few that are “so bad it’s good” because they are one hundred percent committed to making the choices good filmmakers won’t.  As much as we want to see films that get things right, sometimes we want to see a film get everything completely, hilariously wrong, and that can be almost as satisfying.

Actual grade: F

So bad it’s good grade: A