Movies like this should most definitely be watched (preferably with a friend or someone you can laugh with) and taken for exactly what they are. Campy, hilarious, ridiculous, hot messes of movies. If you go into it with no expectations other than to laugh your ass off at the horrible CGI, the random, narcissistic portraits of Tara Reid on the wall and the insane plot line, I really believe it can be enjoyed.
Shane and I actually watched this one together while attempting to get Geoffrey to sleep. Much like his namesake, he seemed to thoroughly enjoy the movie (he told me himself- he's very advanced) and insisted on staying awake for almost all of it. Watching a movie like this with a friend really ups the entertainment value. Who wants to laugh at a man cutting his way out of a shark with a chainsaw alone? Not me, that's for sure.
I hate to admit (no I don't, who am I kidding?) that this is not the first SyFy movie I've experienced. Geoff had a certain affection for these sorts of movies, and his love of them grew on me. Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus comes to mind right off the bat. And last night, while flipping through the channels, I happened upon Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus (which I watched a few minutes of, purely for research purposes, of course). When compared to some of it's predecessors, Sharknado really isn't that ridiculous. Sure, it features not just one tornado, but two, full of sharks (which none of the main characters seem to be that shocked by...). But, in terms of campiness...it really doesn't reach the high level of some of the others I've seen. All in all, I'm not sure why this particular SyFy gem made the splash (zing!) it did on social media. It got 5,000 tweets per minute during it's premiere, including this relevant gem: "Twenty minutes in and we FINALLY have Tara Reid. They held her out like Brando in "Apocalypse Now". Is it the casting- who knew Tara Reid and an old 90210 star had such a big draw- or did they just do a better job of promoting this one? I personally saw the poster back in late 2011 and remember sending a screen shot to Matt (Geoff's best friend) and Christopher (his brother) proclaiming that this movie seemed to be right up Geoff's alley. We lamented about just how much he would have enjoyed it. Perhaps SyFy is just upping their game with promotional materials. Kind of wish they would have spent a few of those marketing dollars on some more advanced CGI, but hindsight is 20/20. Wonder if Sharknado 2 will have better graphics due to the crazy amount of money they made on the first one. Who doesn't want to see yet another movie with sharks bursting out of tornadoes? Don't answer that- I know you're all going to raise your hands.
I can go ahead and pick apart the ridiculousness of the plot line but I really don't need to. A few key points...just because I feel like I have to for the sake of the review...that opening scene. While hilarious (why are these 2 men shooting at each other on a boat in the middle of a storm that will surely kill them both?)- it literally had nothing to do with the rest of the movie. Not a single thing. Ian Ziering seems to have some magical super power as he is the ONLY person in the ocean not losing a limb while the sharks storm the beach. Also, who knew that all you had to do to stop a tornado was drop a bomb into the middle of it to equalize the meeting of hot and cold air? Bet meteorologists around the world could sure learn a lot from this movie. And what are the odds that Fin (how ironic is that name) would end up in the belly of the EXACT SAME SHARK as the chick that fell out of the helicopter?! There had to be hundreds of sharks in those tornadoes, so I just call that fate. Are the son and the "girlfriend" of Fin going to hook up now? That's an awkward and unnecessary twist.
Tara Reid is a hot hot mess. Like seriously terrible. And she had the nerve to call one of the other characters a stripper. Hilarious. I actually saw an interview with Ian Ziering and Tara Reid in which they both said that when they received the script for the movie, it was titled "Dark Skies." The producers knew that they would have to put it under a different title in order to get anyone to even ready the script. Ian Ziering agreed simply b/c he was having a second child and needed the money. Once he found out the real title of the movie, he called his agent immediately and asked for a WAY OUT. Bet he's glad that request was not granted. Not really relevant to this review, but an interesting little fact nonetheless.
All in all I hope you at least got a good laugh out of Sharknado. Kissel- I'm pretty sure you did not as I recall vividly watching a movie similar to this at Dave Knox's house one summer with you and Geoff and seeing the actual pain you were in experiencing something of this low caliber. Don't worry- I know you're coming to visit this weekend and I've filled my DVR with so many gems for you. Between that and Fender's incessant forearm biting, I'm sure you'll have a wonderful visit.
My grade? I did have this at C...but I'm going C+. I enjoyed it and feel it deserves to at least be a full letter grade higher than the train wreck that is Tomb Raider (gross).
Have at it like a shark eating that poor girl's grandfather when she was a kid (she really HATES sharks).
-Ashli
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ReplyDeleteSharknado is a pretty much everything you want out of disaster-horror shlockfest. It really doesn’t care about the things that tie most movies down, namely logic and reason. It has a couple solid running gags, a few hilarious shark kills, and a number of moments that are just so ridiculous, you can’t help but shake your head and laugh a little at least. Like Ashli said, taken at face value, it’s an abomination. As a comedy, it does a pretty solid job.
ReplyDeleteI actually enjoyed a handful of the jokes here. The running gag of Nova learning Fin had more and more family members worked on me, as did the self-referential comments of “seriously, what the fuck is going on here?!” Near the end, we got some cluster bombs of gags – some of the shark kills during the actual sharknado were great, especially Fin holding up a chainsaw and slicing a flying shark in two. Pure. Comedy. Gold. We also get a couple “this is supposed to be a poignant moment” jokes in the supply store. How could you not laugh at Nova’s shark story? WHO GETS ATTACKED BY SHARKS THIS OFTEN?!
It’s tough to talk about this movie in this context of this group without thinking back to Machete Kills. Surprisingly, Sharknado manages to do a couple things better than Machete Kills. Namely, it doesn’t go to the well too often for any one joke, constantly shaking things up in the humor department. Machete Kills was a one trick pony in that regard. In addition, Sharknado does not quite wear out its welcome (more on that in a sec), while Machete Kills was probably 10 minutes too long. Machete Kills definitely wins in the acting, directing, and plot categories. (We can agree MK had a mess of a plot, but at least it had something.) How Sharknado is an 82% on Rotten Tomatoes while MK is a 29% or whatever is absurd.
Speaking of Sharknado’s run time… It did run in a scant 86 minutes, but wow it could have been 60. We really did not need the bus part at all. The establishment of Fin as a do-gooder was done multiple times already, and the payoff joke at the end was not worth it. As Ashli said, the opening could have been cut as well, as we got the idea of what we were dealing with pretty early on in the hurricane. It’s tough to say a movie under 90 minutes wears its welcome out, but it came dangerously close. That 86 minutes could have been used better, but overall, it still works alright.
In terms of the acting, some performances were perfect for the setting, while others were not. I thought Ziering played it too straight and subtle at times. It’s as if he wasn’t in on the joke. Tara Reid has one mode, and it doesn’t work here. I enjoyed everyone else enough, particularly Nova. She got it and bought in to the stupidity. Once again, her shark story was some Oscar-worthy work.
Beyond that, I know it’s stupid to nitpick some of the logic in this movie, but some of it was downright lazy. Fin all the sudden becomes an expert marksman in the sharknado sequence, picking off sharks from hundreds of feet away while correcting for EF5 level winds. Sure. But couldn’t renowed screenwriter Thunder Levin thrown in a couple throwaway lines in the bar about Fin’s shooting ability? Why not make him an Olympic-level biathlete while were here? Would you have questioned it? Same goes for Baz knowing how tornados work. Again, a couple throwaway lines about a passing interest in weather phenomena. Done. Once again, we’re not going to logically get out of Fin jumping into a shark and finding Nova in there as well, but c’mon, we can do better!
82% on Rotten Tomatoes?! Holy shit. That site may have lost most of it's validity lol
Deletehttp://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sharknado_2013/
DeleteOnly 17 reviews, but yes, 82%
Cmon, the mom always said Hollywood was gonna kill me comment was out of sight!
DeleteDammit Riley
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ReplyDeleteSharknado is not without its problems obviously, but it’s a fun and over-the-top disaster movie. I can totally understand the appeal. It’s best to watch in a group while drunk, so that has to be factored in. Even alone on my Kindle Fire, I was laughing at the sheer absurdity of it all. Enjoyable, but overall, it was a little lazy in the script department and some of the performances left something to be desired.
ReplyDelete+ Solid over-the-top humor
+ Doesn’t try to be any more than it is
+ Would be extremely fun in a group setting
- Ziering and Reid were not good
- Managed to need filler content for 86 minutes
- Some logic gaps that could have easily been filled in
Grade: C+
I originally had a B-. I then remembered I gave Taxi Driver a B- and giving Sharknado and Taxi Driver the same grade in any universe is completely insane. Carry on.
DeleteI love a good spoof movie or a good action movie, but this was neither. It was just too sloppy to be enjoyable. I'm fine with the premise, but when you're filming a scene and water is there one moment and not the next, I'm just too distracted. When the windshield wiper sound doesn't match the movement, I'm just too distracted. I don't think I chuckled out loud even once.
ReplyDeleteThey should have used part of their $1,000,000 budget to buy an iPad to better cut the film together.
Brutal.
F.
Full disclosure: I regularly listen to the How Did This Get Made podcast about bad movies, and I listened to the Sharknado episode last week, before Ashli announced her pick. Some of my observations may be subconsciously derived from that episode. Once you get burned for plagiarism, a person takes precautions.
ReplyDeleteI have a feeling this is going to be an unpopular review. Maybe I should've just turned the ol' cerebrum off, but there wasn't enough to entertain my brain stem. Either way, the cerebrum stayed on, and I see myself writing this, but I was just enraged by what was happening.
I don't get these kind of movies. Thunder Levin (really?) might fully understand that he's making a TV movie follow-up to Barracud-eel Vs. PirahnOrca or whatever the fuck ever, but the characters don't know that. This movie needs to be meta as hell, but the only self-awareness in it, besides knowing that Jaws exists, is in the title. Characters get something resembling arcs, heroic sacrifices, and recognizable relationships. They're always right, and they always know what they're doing. Why does the bombing-the-tornado plan have to work? Why can't the movie acknowledge that is the idea of a person who smears their shit on walls?
This might be something paranoid schizophrenic would say, but I feel like the editing was done to specifically fuck with me. So many bad cuts, that the movie effectively ceased to exist in a recognizable time and space. Every time the actors were actually filmed driving or getting out of their car, there's a thin sheen of water on the road. Cut to sharks swimming in three feet of water. A sunny day is shown in the background. Cut to a shark swimming, fully submerged, with remoras. Is this supposed to be funny? A shark flies into the bar window, cut to wide shot of the beach, which looks fine. Why even include the cut to the beach? What did I do to earn the hatred of the director, that he would do these things to me?
The different ways things could have gone just make me hate this movie more. Why didn't it have actual jokes in it? Period jokes? Someone just died, and horribly. That period blood is actually the remains of Tara Reid's boyfriend, little respect please. The Aussie later makes a joke about holding onto panties before he hits the nitrous (ugh). Ziering leaning over with, "Dude, my daughter's back there" would have earned a laugh from me. Did every character over 25 get called old by someone, and in the most unimaginative way possible? The only person who didn't was the pilot son. Ian Ziering's daughter is mad at him not because of neglect, but because to have a son that age with Tara Reid, he clearly raped her when she was ten. Some wounds don't heal, like statutory ones. Comedians punch up scripts all the time. I would think they would jump at something like this.
I could go on with more quibbles that gave me a headache, and are giving me another as I write this. Why did the pilot son/rape baby have to get injured when he was 2, when he wouldn't remember what it felt like? Why not just have him say he was 7? Still have him drop bombs in a tornado, just tell a recognizable anecdote. It's a sub-sentence note, takes two seconds, saves me brain pain. The movie was in love with John Heard's adorable drunk character, but he's introduced taking a big, gross hunk out of Nova's ass. Why am I rooting for this guy? I've gotta wrap this up, or I'm going to smash my laptop.
This is an F. I didn't have a good time watching it. I can't really explain why I was more forgiving to Tomb Raider. Maybe because that was a laughably bad version of something good. This comes from a bad place, so there's nothing to compare it to. It was bad on purpose, but in a boring way. I will not be watching the sequel tonight.
Turns out that there's a way to be good at making a bad movie and bad at making a bad movie. Sharknado, unfortunately, probably falls on the bad side of that ledger.
ReplyDeleteI say probably because I'm trying to figure out if the editing is intentional or is someone just that horrific at their job? I mean, I could edit better than that, so I have to think its intentional. With that, the editing "errors" were some of the things I laughed the most about.
The other laughs just weren't there, though. There was no consistent comedic delivery. The period blood stuck out because that's the only time they used an action movie time good guy snappy one-liner type joke. It'd be like if I only did my Game of Thrones pun once a season, but worse.
I too would have preferred the movie to be a bit more meta. Show me that the characters either are playing is super straight or find the situation ridiculous. A running gag like in Machete would have helped the consistency. They say don't go to the well too much, but it might be smart to go a few times instead of dehydrating. I mean, you have an Australian, that's easy bad movie comic gold! Instead they kill off George early after giving him some redemption (he saved a puppy!) and lose any hope for a comedic presence who has some semblance of timing.
The characters were indeed all pretty one-dimensional. Ho hum. They do make the right decisions all the time, but having a running joke about Fin's experience would have been great. (Like Phil said, he was a heralded marksman until he was dishonorably discharged from the LAPD! He grew up as a lumber jack! His dad was a shark scientist! Keep throwing them in there.)
Something that really annoyed me: Where did they get gas for the chainsaw. Why that annoyed me so much among other things? I don't know.
Normally this would drop a movie into the F range, but there's something saving it and that is rewatchability. A movie not being rewatchable won't hurt a movie for me. How many times can you really rewatch Memento? Or The Usual Suspects? After you've watched once, the cat's out of the bag on those. And a movie like The Master is draining, not something you casually watch. But rewatchability can help a bad movie or good movie. Shawshank, 300, Sin City, Mortal Kombat and Saving Private Ryan are all up there on this factor. I would watch Sharknado again if I saw it on TV. I'd much rather watch this than Tomb Raider.
D+
Ugh. This movie was awful. All 20 minutes I watched before contemplating what the hell I was doing with my life. The initial scene (and subsequent scenes up to the 20 minute mark) reveal absolutely the bare minimum of film making. In the first scene we see a shark poacher attempting to sell their catch to an Asian businessman. The fishing vessel looks to be about 30 feet long, has a ships wheel for steering, a mast and boom with the sail furled. What the actual fuck is a poacher doing with this vessel? I don't know there is too much wrong to relay all the plot holes and just lazy everything in this movie. The actors are literally just waiting for the their to shut their mouth so they can vomit their line.
ReplyDeleteSo what does it take to be a good campy movie? Can a movie achieve insta camp in the way sharknado ostensibly did? I think the answer is no and this is much more a product of social media hype than anything else. Hairspray, Army of Darkness, Dune, Rocky Horror Picture Show. These Campy movies came by their campy credentials by speaking to a certain demographic be it the geek, or overweight women, transgendered or transexual. They not only spoke to these marginalized segments of society but involved them and in the case of hairspray empowered them. They made society see them in a new light. They use absurdity to normalize. Sharknado is none of these things.
There is a place for monster films. The original blob, creature from the black lagoon, and the like. These movies were staples of my youth. They provided shock value and a little sex appeal (albeit 1950' and 60's version) perfect for my young psyche. These movies however stand above sharknado in an important way. They reflect human nature in the way we choose to deal with an inconceivable threat. Man's dangerous herd mentality, the rationality of few, the ingenuity needed to overcome the seemingly insurmountable. I may be romanticizing these features as it has been about 25 years since I have seen these two gems. Safe to say though nothing about humanities faults and or redeeming qualities is revealed in sharknado. At least not in the first 20 minutes.
F- I cannot think of a movie I would not watch if given the choice between sharknado and it.
I need to go back and watch the Blob now that you mention it. that movie terrified me.
DeleteIt really was terrifying watching the faces of the eaten within the blob! the seven year old in me still cowers!
DeleteI was amused and entertained.
ReplyDeleteI didn't love it by any means... who could? I thought it succeeded in being campy. It may not be as good as the campy flicks that Topper mentioned, and maybe his reasoning gives us a good idea why.
Bad script, bad acting, bad editing, bad CGI... good times! We could go on and on about all the things Sharknado does wrong... but there's no reason to, because it doesn't care. They had no intentions of making a good movie. They wanted to take sharks, throw them into a tornado and spit them out at people... so they did.
I liked George... and his bar stool. I actually almost cared that he died. Ian Ziering pulled it off... and by it, I mean making the best of what was going on and playing the part and style well. Did he mean to over act, or is he just a bad actor? Doesn't matter... it worked for me here.
I do think Phil is right, that it could have used a few lines in there... especially if they made them as ridiculous as the rest of the movie. There's no reason they couldn't have made up absolutely any back story they wanted for each character. Nova's should have been the least ridiculous of them all.
For me the oddball thing that stood out.. is when Fin would shoot the sharks and they'd just drop out of the sky. It was as if dying made them so heavy that the tornado could no longer carry them. But it was the kind of ridiculous that made me giggle a little.
I get why people hate this movie... it's bad. But from the moment it starts with that absolutely unnecessary opening scene to the minute sharks can apparently breath out of water... you know it's supposed to be bad at every turn. They want you to notice how bad it is, and laugh at it... and so I did.
C grade.
I'll be watching Sharknado 2: The Second One! this week.... which will certainly be a better than the time I spent watching the second Tomb Raider.
This was fantastically bad. To add to Topper's list, Cabin Boy and, you guessed it, Troll 2 are right up there. It was an awesomely, horrible movie. I have nothing to add to what you all said than that. I will never watch it again but glad I have the experience.
ReplyDeleteEven though it gets a low grade from me, bear in mind it was fun. Just bad.
Grade: D-
Yea, I'm gonna be on the bad bad movie side of this ledger. It doesn't really deserve a ton of thought so I'll just comment on a handful of things you all commented on.
ReplyDeleteAshli- I heard Ian Ziering on the Adam Carolla podcast right after the movie blew up and he also said there that his wife wouldn't let him back out because he needed to get to work and make money for the new baby. He also promoted his upcoming stint in Vegas with Thunder Down Under. I actually thought his was the best performance of the movie- I felt like he was aware but still giving an effort which is the right mentality for a movie like this- if you camp it up it's too cheesy and if you play too straight you look like a moron.
Bobby- I didn't even think about how the bullet in the sharks made them fall out of the air I was too busy trying to figure out how a tiny helicopter with a novice pilot could fly 20 feet from a tornado. http://www.aneclecticmind.com/2009/04/06/how-much-wind-is-too-much-wind/
Apparently helicopter pilots use different winds to their advantages to accomplish various tasks but many avoid flying in 15-20 mph winds.
F
Oh yea, I liked John Heard, I think he may have actually been drunk for this movie
DeleteAye, I definitely laughed at the helicopter flying so close to the tornado...
DeleteHe was just using the wind to perform the task of killing sharks...right? Right!
Sean- that's hilarious. I think I can definitely say I'm the only person in this club that has seen Shark-NAH-Do AND Thunder From Down Under. Not sure if I'm proud of that or not.
DeleteI think some of you are thinking wayyy too hard on this one. There is nothing to analyze- just sit back, turn your brain OFF and laugh at how horribly bad it is. I really do think that campy horror movies like this have their place. Glad I could make so many of you suffer last week. Promise all my movie picks won't be this genre (I actually had quite a few in mind before I landed on this one and none were available on Netflix or HBO Go so I scrapped them).
ReplyDeleteHave you watched Sharknado 2 yet?! It's sitting on my DVR waiting for me
Delete