Sharknado (2013)
Enough Said!
What happens when it’s shark week, you remember it’s shark week, and you’ve already been through all the good shark movies? Well, you force people to watch tonights movie, obviously. I will absolutely never understand why this movie got popular enough to merit having five sequels. Like, I enjoy bad movies and dumb movies and good movies - but there is no reason this really should have caught on like fire. More support for that statement? The entire franchise is below a 4 out of 10. Stunning reviews from the populace right there! Anyways, grab a chainsaw it’s time for Sharknado.
The plot is right in the name. You’ve got sharks. You’ve got tornadoes. Slap them together and you have a fish flavored wind sandwich. Now the sharks can show up all over the place - flood streets, pools, houses that magically contain more water than all the land around it. Now you take some heroes - you know, some Family like you’d get from Fast and Furious - and make them try and survive the sharks. Simple plot, I can’t make it any more complicated because it’s the first of a surprise franchise from SyFy originals - of which basically none have a lot going for them because they are all low-budget flicks. More complex story elements don’t arrive until it’s somehow labeled “a hit” and sequels get made to embrace it’s bad movie nature, so for now all you get is just “freak tornado and wind spouts suck up sharks and start wrecking havoc as a group tries to survive and strike back.”
The acting here is not good. I mean, some of the actors are at least enthusiastic about it, but half the folks feel like they have no real desire to be here - but hey, that might have been intentional. I don’t try and judge actors off of one movie anymore after finding out Kristen Stewart can do more than blank faced Twilight. It’s to be expected of these sorts of movies in all honesty, and later on in the franchise they do start really eating up the scenes and having fun - but here, well… It’s just not really good. With that said, there might be some lines that are entertaining, but expect a lot of hit or miss or disappointment from most audience members.
The characters themselves aren’t much to shake a fishing pole at either. Hero going to hero, wants to protect family. Some get some background moments, like a would-be touching story about a traumatic shark moment from their past, or family dynamics having some pretty rocky roads - but a lot of the time the acting comes up to stone-cold kill whatever emotion it might of had and just make you roll your eyes at it, like “oh how cute, the not-movie wants to be a real movie.” I’m being a bit harsh here, because it does at least have each character have some kind of two dimensional trope like “devoted bar patron” and the likes, but please don’t come in here expecting to see wicked character development.
Shark bait o-ha-ha.
I shouldn’t even need to talk about how the effects are in this movie. Made in 18 days as a SyFy original, we can’t expect the most pristine level of things. Sometimes they’ll look decent - by which I mean it still doesn’t look good but it’s at least not so far removed that it takes you out of the movie. Sometimes it will just cut to stock footage of a shark doing shark things out in the ocean - which obviously isn’t a street, house, or the air - and sometimes it won’t be good, but it’ll be a funny level of blood effects when combined with the “acting.” That said, some of the shark kills are pretty cool - like one getting chainsawed - and some of the people kills can be entertaining - like someone getting splatted by a hammer head shark. It’s budget - expect nothing more, perhaps even less and you shouldn’t be disappointed. Expect anything slightly more than that and you might be mad at whoever is making you watch it.
Sound is balanced. Line deliveries are, well we’ve already gone over the acting so I don’t think I need to repeat it. Plenty of one-liners exist, like it’s trying to find out what kind of movie it would like to be, but most of them aren’t all that great and some of them don’t even feel like they belong there. The music is pretty decent, one could argue it’s the best part of the movie - but I’d also feel a little bad saying music that is mostly alright at best is the highlight of the movie. The real star of the movie is the one-liner that’s essentially just a period joke, which everyone knows all the SyFy originals have a single good one-liner that’s in the movie. Sound effects aren’t bad, although I will say some of the actors sound a bit ADR heavy, granted I don’t know how much of the is because it needed to be dubbed over and how much was just the budget thrown at the movie.
By far, the strongest point of the movie is the ones that came after it. Later movies of the franchise start getting referential, adding in tons of celebrity cameos and preposterous throw outs to other things both SyFy original and more mainstream. For now, the movie is just being another quick cheap original, one that somehow managed to come out and the exact time it needed to in order to grasp a sudden zeitgeist of popularity online. I’m still not entirely sure how it happened, and wouldn’t be surprised to know if it involved some plants in there to help fuel it, but if nothing else it’s a great stand for examples of “the power of the moment and internet.”
They aren’t the most convincing looking sharks.
The average person has no reason to seek this out. Perhaps they get forced into it - maybe they’ll enjoy the quaint cheapness of it. Perhaps they won’t mind the feeling of lacking acting. Maybe they’ll love how bad the sharks can look and overlook all the goofy continuity stuff that happens when the budget is cheap. That said, the ones down the road are better in pretty much everything except quality of effects at times, but everything had to start somewhere, even if it was a freak lightning-in-a-bottle moment that leaves future generations absolutely at a loss as to how it happened. It’s like ancient aliens - you just never really know. Oh, and hey, did I mention Shark Week gets a mention in it? Yeah, that’s right, double shark week tie in, doesn’t matter if the movie is good or not I win - and, just as a note, this is still leagues better than the movie named Shark Week, which does exist as a review on here and might be one of the only things I adamantly recommended people stay away from.