Sharknado (2013)

I really hate it when a movie is purposely made as a bad film.  Whether it be for irony or cult status, it never fails that a bad movie is just a bad movie.  One of the few things I agree with Roger Ebert on is that for a bad movie to be entertaining it has to have at least some attempt behind it to make it a good movie.  Whether it fails to reach that goal through lack of budget, overambition or simple incompetence, there is still plenty to enjoy.  

Asylum is a film company known for making mockbusters.  Many of their movies have titles similar to big budget releases in an effort to trick people into buying the DVDs or Blu-Rays if they are not paying enough attention.  Often found in drug or dollar stores they are a particularly noxious part of the film industry.  They also have a habit of making a lot of movies for SyFy, and almost all of those have a reputation for being unwatchable dreck.  Quite a bit of them involve having sharks or some other animal fight one another, often with terrible CGI.  Those movies became a punchline in the 2010s so it is no surprise that both SyFy and Asylum decided to roll with it and, with a clever marketing campaign, Sharknado became an underground hit. 

Fin Shepard (Ian Ziering) owns a bar in Santa Monica, California, where he enjoys surfing and hanging out with his best friend Baz (Jaason Simmons).  His bartender Nova (Cassandra Scerbo) has a crush on him, and he's friends with a regular named George (John Heard).  Life seems good until Hurricane David moves up from Mexico and starts wreaking havoc on the California coast.  Afraid that the flooding may affect most of the city he tries to convince his ex-wife April (Tara Reid) to take their daughter Claudia (Aubrey Shea) further inland, to no avail.

After his bar is wrecked Fin, Baz, Nova and George try to get across town to Beverly Hills to pick up April and Claudia.  Problem is, the streets are flooded and filled with hungry sharks that are attacking everyone and everything.  To make things worse, after rescuing his family, Fin finds out his son Matt (Charles Hittinger) is also in town at a flight school in Van Nuys.  The group head there to rescue him just as three tornados - full of seawater and sharks - descend upon Los Angeles. 

If writer Thunder Levin and directory Anthony C. Ferrante had bothered to go for straight satire of action genres, similar to what Mick Jackson did with Volcano, I might agree that this would be worth its cult status.  Even if they went full-bore into the action genre and just came up with something silly like The Core it would have worked.  There are some good ideas for set pieces, like the runaway Ferris wheel and the bus rescue.  They are cliches, but they could have worked, and the Ferris wheel sequence pretty much does because that may have used a model rather than CGI.

Instead, Asylum is lazy.  The CGI is just bad, and not bad on purpose.  It is just bad because whoever did it couldn't be bothered to do better.  It's not the level of Birdemic, but it's also nowhere near as good as some early 2000s video games.  That is interspersed with stock footage of sharks, obviously nowhere near where they are supposed to be.  There is a car chase that involves random shots of police that someone did as a b-reel spliced with our main characters driving.  There is also little done to make it look like there is actually a hurricane hitting Los Angeles.  This was made in about three weeks with a million dollar budget, but that's no excuse.  If something like Gareth Edwards's Monsters can come out looking as good as it did just three years before, and with half the budget, there is no excuse other than no one cared about the movie they were making after coming up with the name.

Therefore, it is a surprise that most of the cast at least tries.  Ian Ziering was only in the movie so he could get the minimum amount of work for health benefits as he had a kid on the way, but he at least attempts to sell the character of Fin Shepard the best he can, even to the point of doing some of his own stunts.  Jaason Simmons and Cassandra Scerbo both have some good chemistry with him, while Charles Hittinger is obviously just having fun.  Tara Reid, on the other hand, definitely seems like she knows that her career has hit a low with this film, and the way that every horrible ex-wife trope is thrown in makes the character of April that much worse.

There are plenty of references to Jaws and other Spielberg films, and this is obviously a mashup of that movie and Twister.  There are some jokes that work despite everything, but that laziness and winking knowledge that everyone involved knows what type of movie they are making undercuts any of the fun this could have been.  Just a little bit of effort could have at least made this worth watching but what we get is a half-baked action film that does nothing more than try to sell itself based on its ridiculous premise.

Sharknado (2013)

Time: 86 minutes

Starring: Ian Ziering, Jaason Simmons, Cassandra Scerbo, Tara Reid, Charles Hittinger, John Heard

Director: Anthony C. Ferrante