When Sharknado premiered in July of 2013, it seemed like just another SyFy mega-monster crapfest that had been made for about a few hundred thousand dollars with CGI technology that seemed outdated when Jurassic Park went to video. The poster of the movie is hilarious with Ian Ziering getting top billing.
Ziering who plays the protagonist, Fin (get it?!) in the movie, was to Beverly Hills 90210 was what Brian Jones was to The Rolling Stones. Yes, he was a major player but he didn't seem to have much of an appeal on the show.
Tara Reid, as Fin's estranged ex-wife, April, has been living in obscurity since the second American Pie and the "And John Heard" part is hilarious. Heard rose through the 1970s and 1980s, appearing in movies like Big, Awakenings and the cult classic C.H.U.D.S., before his career ended in the 1990s that he was reduced to recurring roles CSI:Miami and The Sopranos.
The movie seems like just another SyFy movie, but it slowly turns into a parody of the movies very subtle like how A Deadly Adoption was a mockery of Lifetime Movies without giving it the tongue-in-cheek wink.
It's a satire of SyFy movies with the D-list celebrities, who became famous on 1980s and 1990s TV shows, and are now passed their prime and over the top violence that makes the Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino movies look tame.
Sharknado begins with a totally non-sequiter subplot involving the illegal sale of shark fin soup, that ends almost as quickly as it begins. Then, it turns into this silly duck hunt like story where Fin and and the people at his Santa Monica area bar, George, played by Heard (as the what's his name character actor) and Nova, played by Cassie Scerbo (as the sexy young eye-candy) and Baz played by Jaason Simmons (as the stereotypical bloke from down under). travel around the Los Angeles area as they dodge sharks, which are aggressive but would probably never survive as the area gets flooded and sharks fly through the air.
The movie was a success and spawned a sequel, which wasn't that good. It was basically the same as the first movie but with cameos by people such as Judd Hirsch, Matt Lauer and Al Roker, Michael Strahan and Kelly Ripa. It was more of the same with Ziering walking around with his chest pushed out. Ziering understands that the only reason he's in the movies is because he is supposed to be over the top.
Sharknado 2 was terrible, but it seemed to lack the fun of the first one with too much winking at the camera.
Sharknado 3 seems to have return to the joy of the first, but it's obviously running on fumes at this point. You can only seem so many people scream as they are whacked with flying sharks before it gets old. With the third Sharknado which as the subtitle Oh, Hell No! brings back Scerbo, absent from the second one, as she gets to show off her bikini body and is now an avid shark hunter with her lackey played by Frankie Muniz, who is really starting to show more of his age and he's not even 30 yet.
The plot has the sharknadoes becoming a perfect storm all up and down the eastern seaboard. There is a nice beginning where Mark Cuban is the President of the United States and Ann Coulter is the Vice-President. There's also a cameo by Michele Bachmann, but politics aside, the beginning has a funny side to it as it suggests that America would actually approve a Cuban/Coulter ticket and they would run around The White House shooting left and right at sharks, which should be dead before they bullets even hit them, because they're out of water. This is referenced later in the movie when the sharks appear in space. Yes, the franchise has jumped the shark to the point that they've used the "In Space" trope that many horror movie franchises fall into (Leprechaun, Friday the 13th, Critters). The space sequence looks bad and that Anthony Weiner pops up as a mission control leader seems to move the franchise to the Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg territory. Several of the cameos seem to be more topical than clever.
That being said, the movie does have a few good jokes that they could've exploited better. Bo Derek appears as the nagging mother of Reid's April, which shows how April may have gotten her attitude in the first movie. Unfortunately, it wastes Derek, who made her film debut in Orca, one of the many Jaws rip-offs that arose in the late 1970s.
The movie ends with a cliffhanger asking the public to decide on through Twitter, which is where Sharknado found a lot of its appeal.
If there is a Sharknado 4, I'm just wondering what will they do. Ziering is now 51, but looks like he's in his mid-30s, so maybe they should focus on an Expendables like sequel.
Either way, the Sharknado movies will probably be milked for another sequel and Mad Max:Fury Road and Mission:Impossible Ghost Protocol prove that the fourth in a franchise can be better than the original.
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