The "Sharknado" Franchise

[StevePulaski]

Sharknado (2013)
Directed by: Anthony C. Ferrante

Enough shown.

Rating: ★★

I feel that on a serious level, the level in which I try and review all the films I watch, Sharknado cannot be reviewed. It's the anomaly of cinema, an idea that is so preposterous and inconceivable that the only appropriate responses are to watch, laugh, and make smarmy commentary. There's almost no room for genuine criticism and thought on this film that isn't drummed up on the second. I almost feel a live commentary review is in order. It has been roughly ten hours since I watched Sharknado; I think I am late to formally review it by ten hours.

The film focuses on Los Angeles, which during an enormous hurricane is greeted by a large, astronomically destructive tornado that extracts sharks from the ocean and drops them freely in the streets of the city. Now, a group of residents, lead by Fin (Ian Ziering) after his bar is destroyed by the beasts, are forced to use obscure and creative ways to take out the tornado before the entire town is demolished by free-flying sharks.

Unlike many people who discovered Sharknado due to its popularity on social networks the night the SyFy channel premiered it, I knew of it when it was on sale at Cannes Film Festival, alongside other winners such as Copposites, a South African buddy-cop movie and Wiener Dog Nationals, the Beverly Hills Chihuahua of wiener dog movies. As consistent readers know, I can appreciate good, silly movies when they clearly have a sense of fun and earnestness about their production. Sharknado, however, feels cold in this department. Nothing about it feels genuinely silly, as if the filmmakers gathered in a room and decided they needed to make a film that effectively took the most asinine idea proposed and made it into a movie.

Take some of the proclaimed "dumb" films that I like on a level more than stupid filmmaking: Maximum Overdrive, the horror film Jack Frost, The Gingerdead Man, and the onslaught of Tremors sequels. Those films worked because they took their idea and ran with it in such a way that it felt the people behind them were seriously attempting a good film that possessed a laughable idea. Sharknado, on the other hand, continues to show you how dumb its idea is and almost never feels as if it wants to work as something other than purposefully bad entertainment. When you take an idea as idiotic as Sharknado's and coddle it to the point where you no longer want to pass it off as something silly but functional, there's nothing more to be seen than a piece of filmmaking that has a great idea and simply doesn't try. The fun wears off when you get past the fact that the film's disaster at hand is a hurricane that formed a tornado that has the ability to drop sharks on the ground below.

The acting and the writing are predictably atrocious, to the point where we can only hope everyone involved was just joking around. For example, the water in a flooded house becomes dark red after a shark just died. A character naturally replies, "must be that time of the month." Another features a guy and a girl talking when the girl mentions, "sharks killed my grandpa. That's why I hate them." The guy can only reply with, "now I hate sharks too."

The film was made by the company "Asylum," which is infamous for its "mockbuster" films, also known as films that parody a box office hit that are strategically planned to hit DVD right as the film it's parodying releasing in theaters. Most recently, they've raised Pacific Rim with Atlantic Rim and undoubtedly made some confuse Thor, the 2011 superhero film, with their Almighty Thor. Sharknado is another entry in their long line of stunningly ridiculous creature features, right up there with Mega Piranha and Mega Shark Versus Crocosaurus. Again, these are films that bank off of a simple idea that is stretched out to capacity at ninety-minutes or so, making them effectively boring and tedious after the first half hour or so.

Regardless, Sharknado has obviously done something right, whether it's use media to heavily advertise itself, stamp "Enough Said!" on the cover in an attempt to show there's not much else mentally taxing to understand about the idea, and even greenlight a sequel immediately after it became a Twitter-sensation and host a contest on what the subtitle should be. It's only logical to not that there will be an inspired legion of people who regard this as one of the greatest low-budget cinematic achievements in recent years and they may not be wrong. The film, in my eyes, though, is redundant and tiresome. There's just something unremarkable about a film that is self-aware to almost everything it does and every move it makes that it renders the entire "so bad it's good" experience moot and almost entirely ineffective.

Starring: Tara Reid, Ian Ziering, John Heard, Cassie Scerbo, and Jaason Simmons. Directed by: Anthony C. Ferrante.

[StevePulaski]

Sharknado 2: The Second One (2014)
Directed by: Anthony C. Ferrante

The sharks return in Sharknado 2: The Second One.

Rating: ★½

Read the full review on Influx Magazine, influxmagazine.com/sharknado-2-second-one-review/

[StevePulaski]

Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (2015)
Directed by: Anthony C. Ferrante

Rating: ★

Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! is a film made by people that evidently crave more and more attention for a project that, with each and every installment, gets less and less entertaining. Between the incessant promotion for the film on Twitter, resorting to plastering tweets and feedback from the common people during the film's commercial breaks, and the repeated emphasis on product placement and promotional tie-ins, Sharknado 3 is a sorry excuse for a film that, for now the third time, fails instantly for trying to pander to the dumb crowd and continue to harp on a concept that's been dead in the water since the first film.

The story of Sharknado is a rather interesting turn of fate. I recall reading an article months before its SyFy premiere was even a foreseeable option of various films at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival that were up for sale. I was particularly scoping out the ones that looked rather lackluster and, sure enough, Sharknado's poster was featured in the article, boasting its trademark image with the tagline "ENOUGH SAID!." I rolled my eyes and thought little of it until I began seeing a great deal of social media buzz for it upon the announcement that the film would have its North American premiere on the SyFy network. Sure enough, thanks to brazen advertising and an emphasis on the stupid, the film became a runaway hit and a pop culture footprint was made.

The original film was somewhat tolerable, for it was a fresh idea, but was irritating because you could tell from the very beginning that nobody involved in this film wanted to make a film that was the least bit serious or competent. They wanted to create a self-aware film that was well aware of its stupidity, drape it in purposefully poor special effects, and top it off with a plethora of cameos to become a film that was doing nothing trying to garner unworthy attention. The fact is, however, many of us paid it what it didn't deserve and now we have a second sequel and a third one in the works.

This particular film revolves around Fin and April (Ian Ziering and Tara Reid), this time, fighting off a sharknado that is pulverizing the east coast, particularly Washington D.C.. Fin, upon being awarded the Medal of Honor from the President of the United States (Mark Cuban), winds up trying to protect the president during the deadly twister. Finally, Fin heads to Universal Studios in Orlando, where a very pregnant April is vacationing, to try and fight off another sharknado that is destroying the city at the same time yet another sharknado is terrorizing Daytona during the Daytona 500. These storms eventually mold together to create a large, ostensibly unstoppable sharknado that can only be taken down by Fin, April, and Fin's old friend Nova (Cassie Scerbo), as they decide the only way to potentially stop it would be to go into space.

The chaos in Sharknado 3 starts early and rarely lets up, and at about ninety minutes, like its predecessors, the film becomes dreary and repetitive quickly. We get the momentary smirk when we see familiar faces like David Hasselhoff, Penn Jillette, Robert Klein, Jerry Springer, Anthony Weiner, Ann Coulter, Frankie Muniz, and even Michele Bachmann upon many others get their brief moment of fame, but these inclusions are just another ploy for the film to continue to garner unworthy attention. The monotony sets in faster than the skies can darken for an imminent sharknado, and the result is a redundant film that still is more or less giggling at itself and its concept while we should be sitting with a headache from all the eye-rolling we've done.

Sharknado has become less a film franchise and more of a marketing-rich opportunity for corporations, but mostly social media, and that fact is glaring when the film doesn't even end on a complete note and leaves a character's fate (and, to be honest, the future of an actor or actress's career) up to social media. If we had to get a Sharknado 3, could we at least have gotten one that wasn't so insistent on beating a one-note joke into the ground and one backed by a director and writer that wanted to create a decent film instead of a desperately unfunny and pathetic marketing trope?

Starring: Ian Ziering, Tara Reid, Cassie Scerbo, Frankie Muniz, Bo Derek, Mark Cuban, Ann Coulter, and David Hasselhoff. Directed by: Anthony C. Ferrante.

[StevePulaski]

Sharknado: The 4th Awakens (2016)
Directed by: Anthony C. Ferrante

The sharks return in Sharknado 2: The Second One.

Rating: ★

One has to laugh, not at the concepts or the places Sharknado: The 4th Awakens dares to go, but the fact that it successfully exhausted the idea and potential of its premise so much in the third film - going as far as to saving the White House from a "sharknado" as well as the Daytona 500 - that the only thing the series' screenwriter Thunder Levin thought would make for ideal progression is to copy, steal, and cut and paste ideas from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Call it "homage" if you want to ignore or mask the truth, but when your once-original, chuckle-inducing concept can't even be sustained by its own creative material, you've effectively run out of ideas.

This is the fourth installment to the long-winded franchise that began in 2013 after going from an unsold film at the Cannes Film Festival to a pop culture phenomenon on SyFy. It continues to serve as one of those films that's not cheesy because of its budget-constraints nor sensibilities, but because of its own creative laziness. With each passing installment, the Sharknado franchise has grown more and more insufferable, and this one, while not being the worst, certainly is the most forgettable and boring one yet. Not to mention, with characters still speaking almost entirely in catchphrases, the narrative structure remaining almost exactly the same, and a laundry list of cameos from celebrities with presumably nothing better to do, Sharknado: The 4th Awakens only exists to show how desperately this film really, really, really wants to be an undeserving, moronic pop culture staple.

And from the looks of the trending topics on Twitter and the incessant hashtag campaigns, the public has made it just that yet again. The 4th Awakens takes place five years after the last Sharknado attack that left much of the continental United States ravaged by its devastation. The reason being is a company known as "Astro-X," run by CEO Aston Reynolds (Tommy Davidson), has funneled billions of dollars into a series of pods that have been able to operate in space, zapping and destroying any potential Sharknado that forms. In the meantime, Fin Shepard (Ian Ziering) has spent the last few years raising his and April's (Tara Reid) son, enjoying a life of quietness. Meanwhile, April has been hard at work getting her recently amputated hand to function as a chainsaw, a knife, and a lightsaber to utilize in the face of danger.

When a sharknado occurs again, the United States realizes that Astro-X's company hasn't completely eliminated the threat. As a result, varying sources of nature make up these "nados," such as sand, lightning, hail, and at one point, even cows, causing mass destruction. Fin, April, their son, as well as Fin's father Gilbert (David Hasselhoff), in response, all team up to eradicate sharknados once again in hopes to return to their life of peace and stability.

Sharknado: The 4th Awakens is almost depressing in how ordinary it becomes; it kickstarts the action about six or seven minutes in, leaving no time to get reacquainted with these characters or to witness any buildup, but also affirming the fact that this concept was never meant to sustain four films. Its formula sets it up for complete and total failure once more installments are made; the key is to continue to "up the ante" and raise the bar with each sequel, but when you've successfully capitalized on all that the concept could sustain in the last film and have to go as far as to borrow ideas, an opening scene, and a title from one of the most popular franchises in the world, you've only proven yourself to be a colossal creative failure.

Do Ian Ziering, Tara Reid, Thunder Levin, and director Anthony C. Ferrante really have nothing better to do than to work with SyFy and The Asylum company to churn these films out year-after-year? I ask this trying my damnedest not to be condescending, but at what point do you look around at the projects you're putting out, the things you're requested to do and say in these installments, and recognize your energy is going into nothing more than material made with no other purpose other than immediate gratification? The end results have been nothing but consistent embarrassments for everyone involved, with the franchise's highest honor being the fact that it's likely the worst franchise of any kind of the decade and one of the most monotonous and contemptible cash-cows ever made.

Starring: Ian Ziering, Tara Reid, David Hasselhoff, Tommy Davison, and Al Roker. Directed by: Anthony C. Ferrante.