Movie Review: Sharknado

Stars: 1 out of 5

Pros: It’s only an hour and twenty-seven minutes.

Cons: It’s a full hour and twenty-seven minutes you will immediately want back

The Bottom Line:

A crazy premise

Bad writing, plot, and effects

Avoid at all costs

“Every Time it Rains in L.A., Everyone Says It’s the Storm of the Century.”

I remember when the Sharknado franchise became huge, and I remember thinking they sounded horrible.  I did watch another Syfy original movie about that time, and it proved to be as bad as I expected.  But when a friend wanted to watch this one, I gave in.  It was a mistake.

The film takes place around Los Angeles as a hurricane is coming up from the coast of Mexico.  It’s an unusual event here, but it’s also driving the sharks into the beach.  However, as the storm begins to really hit the shores, flooding ensues, meaning that the sharks start appearing everyone.  And that’s before the waterspouts start coming into land.

You want to know about characters?  The film follows Fin Shepherd (Ian Ziering), who owns a bar on the Santa Monica pier who is trying to rescue his estranged wife, April (Tara Reid) and daughter and son with the help of a few friends and employees.

However, the characters are pretty irrelevant.  Even the story is irrelevant.  There is little attempt to have logic interfere with the visuals of the film in any way.  Part of that is because so many stock shots were spliced into the film.  Honestly, cars would be shown in one location in one shot, in another in the next, then be back to the first in the third shot.  The quality of the images kept changing.  Not to mention that some of the shots were so poorly done it was completely impossible to follow the action.

Not that the story needs much of that.  You’ve got people running and driving and screaming and dying.  The plot is really just an attempt to bridge together what are supposed to be cool action sequences.  But those action scenes were just cringe inducing instead.

Speaking of cringing, there’s the special effects.  When it is done well, CGI is wonderful.  This is not an example of CGI done well.  In fact, it is remarkably bad.  Even many of the storm effects are bad CGI.  And don’t get me started on the shots of the characters in cars driving.

It might have helped if the characters had any development.  I’d call these characters paper thin, but that would be an insult to paper.  Most of the actors do the best they can (there are a couple who are pretty bad), but they are giving nothing to work with.

I spent the entire movie cringing, but the two friends I watched it with were laughing at how bad it was.  Not that they were enjoying it.  None of us did.  But they at least laughed at the awfulness.

I don’t get why this movie ever was released, or made, much less why it spawned sequels.  Sharknado is a movie to avoid at all costs.  We all want our hour and a half back.