For My Shudder Pick of the Month I Finally Get Around to Experiencing the Magic of 2013's Sharknado
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Yesterday, my nine-year-old son Declan asked me what a cheesy movie was. I explained to him that a cheesy movie was tacky, goofy, kind of cornball, and impossible to take seriously.
He then asked me if cheesy movies were inherently bad. I responded that wasn’t the case and that some cheesy movies are a lot of fun because they’re cheesy, not despite being cheesy.
I singled out Miami Connection as a cheesy movie that was fun and Snakes on a Plane as a cheesy movie that should have been a lot of fun.
That conversation inspired me to finally experience and write about what I can say, without hyperbole, is a bona fide low-level pop culture sensation: 2013’s Sharknado.
Like Snakes on a Plane before it, Sharknado tantalized the masses with its incongruous central juxtaposition. Snakes On a Plane set killer reptiles loose on a seriously fucked aircraft. Sharknado chronicles a real-life phenomenon where sharks get sucked up into a tornado and end up terrorizing hapless humans hundreds of miles from the nearest beach.
The film’s premise might seem far-fetched, even laughable, but Neil Degrasse Tyson is on record as saying that these films are not gaudy fiction but rather a terrifying warning of what our future holds.
Writer Thunder Levin deserves, at the very least, the Nobel Prize for dreaming up the greatest portmanteau/title/premise in B-movie history.
The genius of Sharknado is that it tells you exactly what you’re in for. It doubles as the film’s premise. There’s just something about the idea of a tornado filled with sharks that appeals to the child in everyone. It similarly appeals to the raging idiot within us all who just want to see flying sharks terrorizing the populace.
Sharknado has humble origins as a Syfy original movie from The Asylum, the notorious schlock factory infamous for churning out “mockbusters”, cheapie knock-offs of famous fare with titles like Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies, The Da Vinci Treasure, Snakes on a Train and of course Transmorphers.
Disaster movies are generally star-studded affairs. Sharknado sequels loaded up on campy cameos from B, C and D list celebrities but Sharknado has to settle for a trio of sluggish performances from name actors.
The great John Heard delivers a decidedly non-great performance as a barfly who is reluctant to leave his second home even in the face of an unbelievable weather emergency.
Heard seems to have accepted the role because it was almost completely sedentary, and he could drink beer throughout the entire shoot. Heard’s boozer has to leave the bar where he drinks himself to death to avoid getting murdered by a shark, nature’s perfect killing machine.
But he doesn't leave empty-handed. He takes his beloved bar stool with him and, in the kind of flourish that makes this spectacularly stupid schlock special, at one point fends off a flying shark with his weapon of choice, his favorite barstool.
Heard died a mere thirteen years after Sharknado, presumably out of shame. Ian Ziering and Tara Reid star as Fin, a hotshot surfer who owns a bar that Heard’s character frequents, and his ex-wife.
Ziering was apparently doing a guest stint with Chippendale’s when he got the call about Sharknado, yet he still had reservations, telling CBS News, "As an actor, my health insurance comes from my unions, and in Screen Actors Guild, you have to make so much every year within the union to qualify for the top tier of insurance. And having a baby shortly after that, I realized, 'I have to do this.' I was really upset, to be quite honest, because the script didn't really read very well. It had holes in it that were left to the imagination for the special effects to fill. And with a low-budget science-fiction film, you never know the level of technology that they have to make the film...But as a husband and a father, no stone goes unturned.”
I’m sure that Ziering then had Robert Towne and Elaine May both do punch-ups of the Sharknado script so that it would be worthy of a dude reduced to being the guest beefcake at Chippendales.
Not only did Ziering appear in a movie with a script that didn’t read well and was full of holes; he also starred in the FIVE SEQUELS, the last of which involves his character traveling back in time to prevent a Sharkpocalypse.
In Sharknado a freak hurricane descends upon Southern California full of poorly realized CGI sharks. The streets of Los Angeles are soon flooded with nature’s perfect dead-eyed killing machine.
Sharknado is an aggressively low-budget variation on disaster movies, which generally require sizable budgets for special effects and all-star casts and whatnot. Sharknado doesn’t have a sizable budget. It does not have an adequate budget. Yet it persists all the same, confident that there’s no way a movie with this premise could possibly lose.
The film’s money shot is a tornado chockablock with the beloved stars of Discovery’s Shark Week. The movie uses this iconic image sparingly, not unlike how Steven Spielberg used the shark in Jaws.
Fin and a band of weary survivors move further and further inland in a desperate attempt to avoid being devoured in a single chomp by sharks who are suddenly a huge part of Los Angeles.
A hallmark of disaster movies is that characters accept their new reality no matter how ridiculous or surreal. It doesn’t get more ridiculous or surreal than tornados filled with sharks.
Sharknado becomes a spectacularly silly story of survival. Sharks come at our heroes from all angles, only to end up on the receiving end of a chainsaw or a shotgun.
It’s crazy that Ziering had issues with the screenplay for Sharknado when it contains a scene where his protagonist, who will return five more times at the very least, is swallowed up by a sea creature, not unlike Jonah in the Bible. Unlike Jonah, however, Fin is armed with his trusty chainsaw so he can chainsaw his way out of the shark’s belly, all bloody and triumphant.
This might seem implausible, but on-set science advisor Neil Degrasse Tyson insists it’s, if anything, too realistic.
It’s not necessarily a criticism to point out that Sharknado is both stupid and bad because the film was designed to be stupid and bad.
It’s Sharknado, after all. It’s not supposed to be good. It’s supposed to be dumb fun, the guiltiest of guilty pleasures. On that level, it succeeds. It’s what I wanted Snakes on a Plane wanted to be.
It strikes the right tone. It doesn’t wink too hard at the audience or go too hard on camp, but it also doesn’t try to be anything other than a uniquely preposterous exploitation movie.
I’m glad to announce that I am no longer a Sharknado virgin. I now know all about the dangers posed by flying sharks. In that respect the film is edifying as well as entertaining.
Of course, Sharknado was just the beginning. The Asylum knew it had a winner, so it exploited the shit out of its most valuable intellectual property with five sequels and three spin-offs.
Sharknado is no mere B-movie. It’s a cinematic universe, or at least it would be if these movies didn’t debut on Syfy.
I’m curious about the franchise, which seems to get sillier and sillier until it can’t get more ridiculous. So if you want to choose 2018’s The Last Sharknado for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0, I wouldn’t mind a bit, in part because its star-studded cast includes Judah Friedlander, Vivica A. Fox, Marina Sirtis, Darrell Hammond, Offspring frontman Dexter Holland, Ben Stein, Dee Snider, Gilbert Gottfried, Tori Spelling, Robbie Rist, Gary Busey, Bo Derek, Mark McGrath, La Toya Jackson, James Hong, Kato Kaelin and, most excitingly, Neil Degrasse Tyson. Tyson did such a good job as the science advisor on all six films and the three spin-offs that they rewarded him with a cameo as legendary wizard Merlin.
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