Sharknado (2013)

Sex :
Violence :
Director Anthony C. Ferrante
Writers Thunder Levin
Starring Ian Ziering, Tara Reid, John Heard, Cassie Scerbo, Jaason Simmons, Chuck Hittinger, Aubrey Peeples
Genre Shark
Tagline Enough Said!
Country

Review

"Six people went into the water and one little girl came out, the sharks took the rest." - Nova Clarke.

Fin Sheppard, a former surfing champion, runs a bar on the Santa Monica Pier for people who have just escaped shark attacks apparently. Unfortunately for our would be Cheers, with their very own Norm at the Bar in the form of George, Hurricane David arrives making things unsafe in particular due to a live shark being washed through the picture frame window. Apparently the first ever Hurricane to hit L.A will also wash 100s of sharks into the streets, go figure. Anyways Fin, George, Taswegian Baz, and barmaid Nova flee the rapidly sinking pier, dodging Ferris wheels on the way. Fin decides he needs to go check on his ex wife April and teen daughter Claudia who improbably live in Beverly Hills.

The streets of L.A are awash with killer sharks, which somehow also make it into the surrounding hills through the storm drains and sewers. Don't blame me this is in the script. Anyways Fin saves wife and daughter and then they have to rush to the Van Nuys airport to pick up his teenage son Matt who is in flight school. Worse is on the way for our beleaguered survivors in the form of three tornados! Tornados that have sucked up killer sharks! It's multiple Sharknados, all heading for the Airport and a date with destiny. Can one family and a few friends stop a disaster from happening or will it rain cats and dog-fish!

Strangely this latest "B" grade shark movie from The Asylum was one of the most anticipated movies of 2013, come on it's called Sharknado! Punters were expecting something to rival the two giant shark movies the Studio had pumped out previously and were just in for a good time. However something really strange happened that threatened to derail the groove train right about the time it left the station, the makers of Sharknado were taking it seriously! Having just watched the movie, term used loosely, for the second time I got to wondering what the hell they were thinking, the great Ed Wood Jnr would have been embarrassed to release this fish stick into the wild. Besides being unintentionally funny the movie defies anything approaching logic and when it is trying to be funny the jokes are flatter than Paris Hilton. Add in some of the worse acting ever to be committed to screen and a script that approaches the low levels achieve by Stephenie Myer and you have a recipe for disaster. As it happened the SyFy channel had a huge tune in when the movie aired and The Asylum in a fit of overreaching even went with some cinema sessions! Not since Snakes on a Plane has a movie been this over hyped and turned out this poorly.

The movie opens with a school of sharks, is that the collective noun? - swimming in dark CGI fashion. We later learn they are "migrating" toward the California coast due to Hurricane David. Could someone talk a few Ichthyologists down from tall buildings please. Anyways in the way of the hurricane and "migrating" sharks is a fishing boat that is harvesting shark fins for a Japanese consortium, or maybe it was Chinese, I don't know. Anyways the boat is 20 miles off the coast of Mexico with apparently 20 thousand sharks closing in. There's a falling out which just happens to coincide with the Hurricane arriving in full force, a pitch gun battle - WTF!?! - goes down that is disrupted by flying sharks. And no this opening gambit has zero to do with the rest of the movie. Reeling from the improbability the audience is then thrust onto a California beach fill of scantily clad chicks and muscled dudes.

Yes the movie is woefully inept but it kept me glued to the screen like a deer caught in headlights.

We then get subjected to real bad CGI sharks, stock shark footage, and more movie mistakes than you can poke a 35 foot white pointer at. A few I noted were, firstly Anthony C. Ferrante trying the Edgar Wright quick edit style for no apparent reason in one scene, or maybe the Editor was drunk while working on the film, your guess is as good as mine. The light keeps changing and in a number of scenes doesn't match the deluge coming down or the supposed high winds. Sharks washed onto suburban streets make growling noises like a dog with distemper. One of our leads is eaten by a flying shark and has the presence of mind to scream out ouch and beseech the shark to get off him, which I guess is what you do if being eaten alive by a carnivorous fish. Tara Reid can't act, but I guess that was a given anyway. In one scene a house has water up to about waist level, but surprisingly the water hasn't engulfed the car outside. And water levels and shark sizes fluctuate depending on the requirements of either the script or the stock footage being used. There's a whole bunch more, I've got at least twelve mistakes in my notes, but you get the point this movie isn't long on internal logic or obeying the laws of physics.

I'm not even going to mention the eye of the hurricane devastating L.A or sharks acting in increasingly unsharklike fashion. Watching the movie you get the feeling that The Asylum simply said what the hell, we got the world's best ever movie title.

Of course there are some cool things going down in the movie that keep you entertained. Apparently dropping bombs into the middle of a tornado changes the air pressure and dissipates the phenomena; of course said bomb is tossed into the tornado from a helicopter which remains unaffected by the weather disruptions nearby. Our lead character Fin does a Derek with a chainsaw leaping into the jaws of a descending shark, which is just as well as the shark previous swallowed another character whole! What are the odds of it being the same shark? Plus there are enough explosions to keep Michael Bay happy and a whole lot of gun play. Almost forgot we also get a car chase as The Asylum covers all bases.

Acting is uniformly over wrought with perhaps the best performances coming from Aussie Jaason Simmons (Baz Hogan, you have to be kidding me) and Aubrey Peeples (Claudia) who gets to do a teen chick emo thing that sort of comes out of left field and underlines the fact that script writer Thunder Levin can't write character development beyond throwing a few tropes onto the table.

On the bright side the Director has the movie rocking along with no drop off in pace as one improbable scene follows the next in a sort of deluge of poor movie making. When the movie is called Sharknado we aren't expecting Oscar winning material but this film barely rates an entry in the "C" grade category.

The final thing I wanted to mention was that people apparently run in straight lines in front of rapidly descending things. At least one extra runs afoul of a Ferris wheel that has gone rogue which kind of reminded me of the alien ship crashing in Prometheus.

Sharknado was one of the movies I was looking forward to this year and unfortunately what I watched wasn't worth the wait. Clearly the title and sheer brilliance of the concept had a lot of us ready to rock, but on the night the band was playing polka and missed an opportunity to have a cult hit going down. No recommendation, "B" grade fans are going to be across the movie already, everyone else would be better advised to check out something else. If you get the chance to score the movie for free then have a look otherwise it's not going to ruin your life if you don't catch Sharknado. The Asylum have announced a sequel which tends to prove they really have no idea what this one was all about when it comes to the punters.

ScaryMinds Rates this movie as ...

  The term inept comes to mind immediatly.