Sharknado - It Sucks. Go See It. Enough Said!

In the world of cinema, there exist movies made to make us laugh, ones to make us cry and ones that want us to feel both at the same time. Films have budgets of all kinds, some very high and some very low, but the end product doesn’t necessarily correlate with the cost to make it; Shaun of the Dead, for instance, is a very good movie made on a $6,000,000 budget while, conversely, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End cost $300,000,000 to make and wasn’t all that great. But then we have Shark movies, a sub-genre of B-movies which revolve around killer sharks and are created on shoestring budgets, which often creates a hilariously bad end result (except for Jaws, which is the only legitimately good Shark movie). Here, we have one of these movies, Sharknado, a Shark movie so bad that even the creators at The Asylum, who are no stranger to such films, were in on it and made their opinion known in the tagline: “Enough said!” Sharknado aired on the Syfy channel and garnered much media attention, leading to bigger ratings and even a limited midnight theatrical run. Its mere $1,000,000 budget shows hard, and the result is something so spectacularly awful that there is absolutely no reason to not see it at least once.

Sharknado follows a man named Finley “Fin” Shepherd (Ian Ziering), a surfer and owner of a bar on the Santa Monica Pier. A freak storm hits Los Angeles, a tornado filled with sharks. When some of the sharks end up on the beach, the local beach-goers decide that all they really need to do is avoid the water for a couple of days. However, that plan goes down the drain quickly as sharks manage to jump through the windows of the bar and the tornado, which operates more akin to a hurricane, generates waves large enough to not only heavily damage the pier, but also much of the surrounding area, creating a large death toll. Knowing how dangerous it now is to be near the beach, Fin decides to go, along with friends Baz (Jaason Simmons) and Nova Clarke (Cassie Scerbo), to Beverley Hills to rescue his estranged wife, April (Tara Reid) and teenage daughter, Claudia (Aubrey Peeples), before the storm gets too far inland.

The plot of Sharknado is as thin as the blood spilled in the movie and only serves as an excuse to give the audience something ridiculous and over-the-top to laugh at and sometimes with. At some point it gives up on really telling the story that manages to exist, since it actually switches gears halfway through, but barely anything holds it together anyway so there’s no actual reason to care. This is all right though, as it’s far more entertaining to see just how insane(ly stupid) the situations eventually become all the way to the absurd end. Every actor is completely wooden in their performance, but you can’t help but laugh with them, as they somehow manage to say so many dumb lines in a row with a straight face (including an obligatory Jaws reference/misquote). Surprisingly, Cassie Scerbo manages to deliver some emotion into her performance and has a back story that would make one actually care about her character. Unfortunately, this kind of character is in Sharknado, so it doesn’t really matter in the long run.

Equally bad are the effects, which are pretty obvious against the real world backdrop. Not only that, but the editing is so amazingly bad. Shots will change from being clear to dark and grainy and stock footage is spliced in everywhere. You could even make a drinking game out of every instance of these happenings, as well as times you can see dryer road when it’s supposed to be flooded (I swear I even saw cars go by on a low road during a scene with a flooding bus), but your liver will probably hate you for it if you don’t set the right rules. Where in other movies I would complain about the constant cuts, I could hardly stop chuckling at the inconsistencies on display here.

Stupidity and ridiculousness go hand-in-hand for the entire 86 minute duration, but that’s pretty clearly the point. The plot is an excuse for one of the more unbelievable premises for a Shark movie, let alone any movie, and the effects and acting are both incredibly lame, but there is definitely a certain charm to the whole thing that keeps you watching despite that. I encourage you to see Sharknado; you will not regret it.