A Snow Globe Christmas

Every year, the market gets flooded with an influx of Christmas films. So many Christmas films, in fact, that many of them share similar titles, premises and even whole plotlines. This close similarity brought us to two films, Snowglobe and A Snow Globe Christmas, both about a woman who gets magically transported to a snow globe world and both featuring the same actress, Christina Milian, in two completely different roles. Though we typically shy away from relatively lesser-known Christmas films, our curiosity got the better of us and we ended up watching both of these in particular just to see how differently they executed the same premise. Without spoiling too much, we can safely say that one of them actually turned out fairly decent and the other was A Snow Globe Christmas.

The Last Sharknado: It's About Time - History's Biggest Disaster Comes To An End

Note: This review contains spoilers for Sharknado 5: Global Swarming.

After six years and an equal number of installments, The Asylum’s Sharknado hexalogy has reached its conclusion with The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time. While the series was once able to attract an audience based on how over-the-top bad it was, successive installments would continue to lower the bar until it truly needed to be put out of its misery. Unfortunately, The Last Sharknado does nothing to fix the downward trend of the series, nor could it ever hope to recapture the glory of the first installment.

Following the ending of Sharknado 5: Global Swarming, Fin Shepard (Ian Ziering) is taken back in time to the period of the dinosaurs with the aid of his grown son, Gil (Dolph Lundgren), who is unable to join him because, as Gil (Brendan Petrizzo and M. Steven Felty) tells him, you can only travel back in time once. While there, Fin meets up with Nova Clarke (Cassandra Scerbo), Bryan (Judah Friedlander) and April Wexler (Tara Reid), all of whom were pulled backward in time by Gil before they could die in previous movies so that they could destroy the first Sharknado and return time back to normal. Killing the Sharknado in the past, however, creates a Timenado, a wormhole that Fin and crew must now continue to travel through in order to destroy various Sharknados throughout history before the sharks can cause irreparable damage to the timestream.

The story and plot are, naturally, almost hard to sit through. The various time periods usually contain some form of anachronism, most noticeably within the already non-existent Arthurian time period, in which Excalibur is a chainsaw and Morgana Le Fay (Alaska) speaks in a modern tongue. Additionally, the rules of time travel are rather inconsistent and difficult to figure out when placed within the context of the film. A few plot twists which pop up later in the movie are also so ridiculous that they feel out of left field and, as such, elicit more groans than they do laughs.

What doesn’t help the movie are the incredibly forced pop culture references, including, but not limited to, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Back to the Future (1985) and the works of Twisted Sister and The Offspring. Then there’s the traditionally terrible special effects, which have now gotten so bad that one sequence towards the end of the movie has incredibly obvious greenscreen due to bad chroma keying, something which even the worst Sharknado effects did a better job of covering up.

Lastly, we have the obligatory celebrity cameos, however it seems that they were truly scraping the bottom of the barrel this time, even picking up wood shavings. Here, we have appearances from such names as Neil deGrasse Tyson, Darrell Hammond, Dee Snider, Bo Derek, La Toya Jackson and RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Alaska, along with the return of Gary Busey, Gilbert Gottfried and Al Roker.

The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time is easily one of the worst Sharknado movies, if not the worst. A terrible story with an equally terrible plotline, more forced references, somehow even worse special effects than Sharknado 5: Global Swarming and a completely unsatisfying ending. Only those who have been keeping up with the series for this long should consider watching it, and even then, you may feel like you’ve wasted your time. In any case, I’m glad that we’re finally done with Sharknado movies, at least for now.

Sharknado: The 4th Awakens - It Jumped the Shark

Note: This review contains spoilers related to Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (2015) and Sharknado: The 4th Awakens (2016).

In 2016, SYFY aired the fourth installment of the Sharknado film series by The Asylum. We somehow did not review the movie during that year, so we decided to review it close to the airing of the grand finale of the series, The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time, in order to finally fill in the unsightly gap in our Sharknado reviews.

Five years have passed since the ending of Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (2015) and the world has been Sharknado-free thanks to technology developed by Astro-X’s Astro Pods, developed by tech mogul Aston Reynolds (Tommy Davidson); Astro-X had also developed a new type of shuttle that recovered Fin’s father, Col. Gilbert Shepherd (David Hasselhoff), from the moon. Fin Shepard (Ian Ziering) has also moved into a farm in Kansas, “April’s Acres”, where he lives with his mother Raye (Cheryl Tiegs) and son Gil (Christopher and Nicholas Shone). During the opening night of a shark-themed hotel in Las Vegas, which inexplicably houses a giant tank of sharks, a new Sharknado forms within the city, but the Astro Pods can’t stop it, since it wasn’t created from water. With the world once more in danger from the Sharknado phenomenon, Fin must once again step up to save the world.

The plot which follows is so ridiculous that I genuinely facepalmed a few times. Not only can a Sharknado now spontaneously occur without a body of water, but it can absorb the elements to become a new type of -nado. One chain of -nado transformations is a Bouldernado, which turns into an Oilnado, which then catches fire and becomes a Firenado. This Firenado is then extinguished (by exploding fire extinguishers, naturally) and touches some power lines to become a Lightningnado; we were disappointed they didn’t instead call it a Shocknado, but that might’ve been too clever for the writers. The ultimate of these transformations is a Nuclearnado/Nukenado, which contains so much concentrated radiation that the main cast should’ve honestly died from coming into contact with it.

While Fin is out fighting the -nados, the movie goes through two sub-plots. The first involves the revelation that April Wexler (Tara Reid) had not only survived the ending of the previous movie, but had also been turned into a cyborg by her father, Wilford (Gary Busey), in order to keep her alive. This sub-plot is the closest the movie gets to having familial conflict, but the context in which it's presented means it’s hard to take at all seriously. The other involves Aston and Col. Gilbert working on potential solutions for fighting the -nados, which includes introducing new isotopes to the Astro Pods (sure) and the construction of a wearable mech suit. This sub-plot, though heavily involved in the story, relies on the audience taking everything the characters say at face value.

In general, however, Sharknado 4 relies on breaking conventional logic just so the story can continue, which includes Gil surviving a Nukenado by hiding in a regular wooden barrel. The plot is also littered with convenience and contrivance, especially the final scene, in which it’s revealed that not only did Fin’s immediate family survive the events of the movie despite almost all of them being eaten by sharks, but all of the sharks involved within a chain of sharks being consumed by ever larger sharks (matryoshka sharks, if you will), culminating in a random blue whale, happened to all be the same sharks that consumed the Shepard family.

As is natural for the Sharknado series, there are plenty of pop culture references peppered in. However, the references in this movie feel incredibly forced and a lot of movie quotes often feel completely out of place, as they are completely removed from any context in which they would work. Some of the more obvious references include those related to then-relevant Star Wars Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015), such as a Star Wars-esque opening title crawl and a chainsaw weapon modeled after Kylo Ren’s lightsaber, not to mention April being able to wield an actual lightsaber. One other notable reference is several related to The Wizard of Oz (1939), if only because of how long and dragged out it is. At this point, the movie even has the gall to point out how ridiculous it is:

Fin: “Follow the road! Follow the yellow brick road! I can’t believe I just said that.”

This, of course, does not excuse the fact they still went for it.

Apart from the incredibly bad special effects, and not in the fun way, there are plenty of celebrity cameos. However, these cameos are generally of a decidedly lower tier than its predecessors. Some of these include David Hasselhoff, Gary Busey, Carrot Top, Gilbert Gottfried, Steve Guttenberg, Vince Neil, Corey Taylor, Dr. Drew Pinsky and Adrian Zmed, although we also see the return of Al Roker and the inexplicable addition of Chippendales strippers (notable by virtue of their prominence in the first act). Many of the celebrities are also either crushed or eaten by sharks, including Carrot Top (probably his best act in years). I’ll also mention here that the movie can be very brazen and in-your-face with its product placement, most notably Xfinity, since they reference it by name, show off a voice-controlled remote feature and almost literally rub the logo in your face.

Before I end, I'll note that if there are any fans of Lavalantula (2015), this film seems to make a reference to it that implies it's within the same universe as Sharknado.

Sharknado: The 4th Awakens marks a clear turning point in the Sharknado franchise. The story and plot are too ridiculous for their own good, the special effects are laughably bad and the references and product placement are too forced and unnatural. It may be better than its successor, Sharknado 5: Global Swarming (2017), but that doesn’t take away from the fact that a franchise entirely about sharks had somehow managed to jump the shark.

Sharknado 5: Global Swarming - #MakeSharknadoGreatAgain

This year, Syfy continues its annual tradition of airing another installment in the Sharknado franchise. While the first three enjoyably reveled in the depths of absurdity, the fourth one is when the series began to outstay its welcome, with a plot that stretched suspension of disbelief too thin even for a Sharknado movie and cameos from increasingly lower-tier celebrities. This trend continues with Sharknado 5: Global Swarming, which wasn’t “so bad, it’s good” so much as it was just straight up bad.

An undisclosed amount of time after the events of Sharknado: The 4th Awakens, Fin Shepard (Ian Ziering) and his family are summoned to London to speak with NATO about the Sharknados. Almost as soon as he arrives, Fin is contacted by Nova (Cassie Scerbo) and asked to explore a passage underneath Stonehenge to look for an ancient artifact that may be connected with the Sharknados. After a sequence ripped straight out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Fin and Nova retrieve the artifact, which triggers a collapse that sinks Stonehenge before summoning a Sharknado that devastates part of London. As Fin battles the Sharknado, his son, Gil (Billy Barratt), who is wearing a helmet that protects him from sharks and severe weather, becomes trapped in the storm and vanishes along with it. With Nova’s help, Fin and his wife, April (Tara Reid), follow the chaotic storm around the world in an attempt to rescue their son and prevent the Sharknado from growing stronger.

The story is painful to watch, as it not only starts with the protagonists unwittingly creating the initial Sharknado, it also relies on poor logic to move itself forward. There are a lot of inexplicable conveniences made solely to protect Fin from dying, such as the Sidney Opera House transforming into a battle station, or give him additional power, such as the Pope (Fabio) giving him a super powerful chainsaw. When the protagonists are given the solution, they don’t use it and instead opt for one which involves a severe anachronism and there is a subplot where someone steals the artifact (for no discernable reason) that only exists to create unnecessary drama. This concludes with an ending that, while surprisingly dark, rips off another famous movie and somehow manages to set up a sixth installment. It’s also hard to care about any of the characters during the movie, as it’s painfully obvious that Fin is going to survive the whole ordeal and that nearly anyone else who shows up is most likely going to get squashed or eaten by a random shark.

On top of the painful story, there are the obligatory cameos from mostly lower-tier celebrities. While any of the cameos are subjective in their enjoyment, I personally liked the cameo by Tony Hawk, especially since he is one of the few who isn’t directly killed by a shark. There are also more appearances by real-life news anchors, who seemed to trade some of their dignity for a chance to report on the chaotic Sharknado devastating the globe. In spite of anyone’s ability, however, just about everyone still falls under the plague of stiff and wooden acting that permeates the film as a whole.

On a technical level, it’s a given that the CGI is terrible and the special effects are incredibly fake-looking. In the case of Sharknado 5, there is possibly an overabundance of special effects, even for a Sharknado movie, which adds to the feeling of a completely unbelievable story, even by Sharknado standards. The only notable music is a reappearance of the official theme song at the beginning, coupled with animated footage referencing famous movies and the “Left Shark” internet meme.

Sharknado 5: Global Swarming is simply a bad movie. With a dumb and unbelievable plot line, bad acting, forced references and horrendously bad special effects, it’s hard to recommend this to anyone apart from the diehard fans. We’ll likely still watch Sharknado 6, teased during the ending, but more out of obligation, as the setup gives the impression that the writers have completely run out of ideas. Only time will tell if a franchise that already jumped the shark can possibly recapture what made the first one so enjoyable.

Sharknado 2: The Second One - Shark Happens Alright...

Last year, the SyFy (pronounced “Sci-fi”) network introduced the world to Sharknado, a movie from The Asylum that first became a cult hit and then a viral one, to the point where some theaters once had a midnight matinee screening (the time of night most known for showcasing cult films) and it received an official Blu-ray release in the UK. The memetic status of this movie was enough that Syfy not only signed on to have a sequel created, they held a contest on Twitter to determine its name. The winning name belongs to the subject of this review: Sharknado 2: The Second One. While I didn’t watch this one when it first aired, I did manage to see it recently via DVR (and just in time for Shark Week too). Since then, I’ve come to the conclusion that The Second One may be even more beautifully bad than the original.

After an unspecified amount of time since the original movie, Fin Shepard (get it?!) (Ian Ziering) and his ex-wife, April Wexler (Tara Reid), are on a flight to New York City to promote April’s new book, How to Survive a Sharknado and Other Unnatural Disasters. During the flight, Fin begins to see a shark in the dark clouds outside his window, but is told to calm down lest he scare all of the passengers aboard (incidentally, this scene feels like it was ripped straight out of The Twilight Zone, though with a shark instead of a gremlin). Fin, however, turns out to be right as a number of sharks fly around the plane and end up blowing up the engine before tearing the aircraft apart, killing several passengers and both of the pilots. April tries to fight back by firing a gun at one of the incoming sharks, but she is unable to prevent it from taking both her hand and the gun into its mouth; April feels that this is because the shark knew her somehow (this is never mentioned again). Despite having no formal flight training, Fin goes up to the cockpit and manages to perform a safe emergency landing onto the runway below. Once he exits the plane, he tries to warn New York, New York about a horrible truth: a Sharknado is coming, bigger than the one in Los Angeles, and it’s going to rip the city apart; unfortunately, no one, not even his family, believes him.

Much like the first installment, The Second One has a very poor narrative. All of the characters continue to make poor choices, such as insisting to stay outside in the middle of a Sharknado or not considering that Fin, who should damn well know what he’s talking about (having already survived a Sharknado and all), might be on to something at the suggestion of one striking New York City. Not only that, there are plot threads that are introduced only to go absolutely nowhere, one of these being introduced when Brian (Judah Friedlander) runs into Harland “The Blaster” McGuinness (Richard Kind), a former baseball player, at a Mets game. Harland wants to be able to make up for his failure in a game, or something like that, and is able to bat a shark away for a home run; neither this character nor plot thread is heard from again. I could go on, but then I’d be spoiling what goes on. However, I will say that Skye (Vivica A. Fox) is the only actual character in the whole movie, since she has a genuine personality and is capable of fighting the sharks like Fin. Even then though, I’m genuinely amazed that all of the actors, including Fox, were able to say so many dumb lines in sequence with such a straight face on film.

Pictured: Fin Shepard (Ian Ziering; left) and Skye (Vivica A. Fox; right).

Also like the first time around, the editing is horrible and reality is non-existent. With editing as shoddy as this, the film is very inconsistent in what the environment looks like between cuts, such as when Fin goes to the cockpit to fly the plane. In previous shots, we see that the sharks have ripped it open to eat the pilots, but when Fin gets there, the area is perfectly fine save for blood and guts left behind by the first shark to run into it. There is also a scene where the streets literally (in the literal sense) can’t decide if they are flooded or dry or if the sky is raining or not. Naturally, physics is also thrown out the window, since sharks can still be taken out of the sky and have all momentum be destroyed, plus Fin still believes that a single bomb can take out an entire tornado (if weather worked that way in real life, then we’d be doing this all the time). To make matters worse, time doesn’t seem to be a factor in anything either. Whenever something urgent comes up, characters are more willing to waste time instead of getting down to the important task at hand. In other words, this movie seems to take an artistic license with everything it possibly can. As for the effects, they are a little better this time around, but better still doesn’t mean good.

The effects are so cheap that they even recycled the
Sharknado from the poster for the first movie.

Unlike the first movie though, we have the added bonus of celebrity cameos, and a good number of them to boot. We get to see the likes of Wil Wheaton, Andy Dick, Kurt Angle, Billy Ray Cyrus, Jared Fogle and many, many more. Some of these celebrities are also in roles reflective of earlier works they’ve been in, such as casting Judd Hirsch as a taxi driver named Ben (since he played a driver named Alex Rieger on the show Taxi) or Robert Hays as the airline pilot (he is known for his role as Ted Striker in the movie Airplane!). Of all the cameos though, I found it a little baffling just how much screen time Al Roker and Matt Lauer (playing themselves, naturally) from the Today show get. Their time in the film is more than just a brief few seconds or a single line; whenever they show up, they get what feels like a good five minutes or so where they discuss the Sharknado phenomenon, complete with inexplicably appropriate graphics (though it takes longer for Matt Lauer to catch on than Al Roker). The only real reason that the Today show or The Weather Channel are prominently featured is because they, like Syfy, are owned by NBC Universal, but even then it's a little crazy just how much screen time they get. In any case, most of the cameos are merely background appearances or for characters who have otherwise no bearing on the plot. I’m just amazed at all that so many people even agreed to show up in a low budget shark movie.

The Sharknado seems to have been strong enough to rip away
Al Roker and Matt Lauer's collective dignity.

Sharknado 2: The Second One is an incredibly bad movie, but also one that clearly knows this fact and runs with it as far as it possibly can. The script is outrageous, its twists are even more ridiculous, the editing is horrible and some of the cameos are downright baffling. In the end, the sequel proves to not be even worse than the first one, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to watch. I can almost guarantee that you’ll find yourself laughing at this mess of a movie throughout, or at least find something to enjoy within the madness that is a swirling vortex of doom filled with sharks. This appears to be all they needed though, since Syfy has recently announced a third installment due for 2015, although the subtitle, if there is one, has yet to be determined (I just hope they don’t go with “The Third One”).

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.