The "I finally saw" tag counts for Sharknado in more than one way. Most of the time, I use it to indicate a film that's either culturally significant or personally significant that it took me longer to see than I would have expected. If one of those has to apply here, I suppose "culturally significant" is the one.
But in this case it's also because I have started to watch Sharknado twice before and never gotten past the first few minutes.
The first time, probably not long after it came out, it was a sudden, firm decision that this just wasn't the movie I wanted to watch tonight. It's possible I made that decision within only one minute of watching.
Then sometime in the last six months to a year, I made a real attempt to watch it. But I had some sort of streaming issue, and it got stuck after about three minutes. Although I was able to watch a different movie that night, I just couldn't get Sharknado out of its permanent state of buffering.
Friday was the sickest of my days in a week of having a cold, so after I stumbled to the end of a remote workday, I repaired to the garage for a movie on the projector or three. Sharknado was the third.
When you watch Sharknado, of course what you are hoping for is that it's so bad it's good. But a criticism I think I have heard leveled toward this movie is that by trying to be so bad it's good, Sharknado can't capture this tricky balance -- a failure that has not prevented it from receiving five sequels to date, meaning it certainly spoke to somebody. (And here I would have thought all the nado-related shark activity was exhausted in this one film.) To really be so bad it's good, you have to come by it honestly -- which I understand a movie like Birdemic does. (Maybe that'll be next on my list of movies to finally see.)
I gave Sharknado 1.5 stars on Letterboxd, feeling that only 1 star would be giving it a win of some kind.
I always find it hard to decide what to do with movies that are terrible and yet you enjoy them. I believe Troll 2 has a half-star rating from me on Letterboxd, the same as movies that I hated. But I didn't want to give Sharknado the same sort of extreme rating because it suggests that I was either incredibly offended or tickled pink by it. Really I just felt like it was trying too hard to do something that was sort of funny as just a single joke rather than an entire movie.
I just checked and I actually gave Troll 2 1.5 stars, same as Sharknado. It's interesting how 1.5 stars can perform in two different ways depending on the movie. There, I think I wanted to indicate that Troll 2 was awful but that it achieved a certain glory in its awfulness. Here, I don't want to give Sharknado the credit it so obviously wants for being the next Troll 2. Same ratings, different feeling.
Let's get into the movie itself.
And let's start with the actors, those that I recognized. I don't know what direction or lack of direction Anthony C. Ferrante gave them, and whether he wanted them to be intentionally something or intentionally something else. So I am forced to take it at face value and conclude the following:
- Ian Ziering is actually pretty good and maybe sort of should have continued to have a career after Beverly Hills 90210. He was always decent on that show -- whatever you may have thought of it, acting wasn't really the problem. But like most of the other alums except Luke Perry (R.I.P.), Ziering faded into the background pretty quickly and had to be revived by Sharknado. Of course, then that also immediately stigmatized him or maybe pigeonholed him, because I don't see his name in anything legit on IMDB in the last decade -- though you'll be glad to know he survives at least the first four of the five Sharknado sequels.
- Tara Reid is actually pretty awful. She may never have been a gifted actress, but in this movie she just looks confused most of the time. She was at least passable in her previous work.
- John Heard is ... in this movie for what reason? And not for very long. (Spoiler alert.) (Also, R.I.P.)
So I think one of the ways this movie envisions itself as pretty bad is to be utterly indifferent about the background conditions in which it is filming. The movie is supposed to take place during a hurricane in Los Angeles featuring numerous water spouts that distribute sharks around the city. Stipulated. This would of course result in every major road and intersection in the city being clogged with standstill traffic, and the specter of traffic does indeed figure into the plot at one point or another. However, then certain scenes are also shot on what appears to be the sunniest day in Los Angeles with traffic moving freely. You could argue that in hurricane conditions, people would stay home, so what traffic was on the road would move -- but if so, you have to film in those conditions. If it's clear, then people would be in a panicky, leave-the-city stage and then that's when traffic would be unmoving.
I think the joke is supposed to be "On a real no-budget film made by clueless filmmakers, they would be forced to film in whatever conditions happened to present themselves on the day of filming, and what's worse, they wouldn't care about or possibly even notice the continuity error." Sure. But in Sharknado they don't exactly play this up, so you don't really know if it's supposed to be that, or if there's some other explanation. I guess to wink at the audience would reveal that they were in on the joke, which they don't want to do, but as presented here, it left me unsatisfied because the hand wasn't strongly enough played if it was being played at all.
The density and aggressiveness of the sharks is comical and I suppose worthy of a chuckle or two. Even if you did have this strange phenomenon where sharks were caught in water spouts, you'd figure it would be a one-off, and not that every shark in the ocean was caught in a water spout and dumped on Los Angeles. In a typical scene there's not one shark they have to evade, but about 50. I suppose trying to analyze this with any relationship to realism misses the point entirely and plays into what the filmmakers are trying to do.
I will say that it climaxes with a great money shot.
So what more or less did Sharknado need to be to work for me? It's hard to say, though I can venture some ideas. An obvious point of comparison, since both deal with fish, is something like Alejandro Aja's remake of Piranha from 2010, which I thought was an absolute hoot. That level of effects and humor would have worked for Sharknado. Then again, only a cheap-o company like Asylum actually thought it was an idea worth converting into a film, so this is the Sharknado we got.
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