Sharknado is here!



View trailer here

FILM REVIEW:
(Please leave your own reviews in the Comments section)


If you want to watch an action movie about man-eating sharks, you can always look to Deep Blue Sea. If you want to see one about tornadoes, there’s Twister. If you want to see a movie that combines the two, then you have some seriously questionable taste. Fortunately for you, so do the programmers at SyFy.

Ian Ziering (Fin) plays a bar owner and surfer as convincingly as he played a high school student at the age of 30 on 90210 twenty years ago. He hasn’t been seen much since then. Not sure what he’s been doing with his time, but it sure didn’t involve acting lessons. And he fake surfs about as well as he fake bartends. But enough about Ziering’s acting, because that’s really not the reason anyone is watching this. They’re watching it because they’re sadists.

Tara Reid, in her best performance since 2005’s Alone in the Dark, plays April, Fin’s ex who will not allow such nonsense as sharks swimming in the streets and falling from the skies to allow him to sneak in an extra custody visit with their daughter Claudia. Because Ziering looks just like he did when he was playing a high school student, and he was arguing over visitation with his daughter, I was surprised when Claudia made her first appearance. Instead of some toddler in pigtails, she looked to be in her early 20’s. Following in daddy’s footsteps for sure. Anyway, lots of heart-wrenching family issues to be dealt with here. It’s very similar to Kramer vs. Kramer, but with tornadoes and sharks!

The screenplay provides a series of uncompromising conversations that involve "This is crazy" and "Do you trust me?" There’s a lot of bad dubbing, poor CGI, shoddy editing and cheap production values. Most annoying is the shooting of scenes outdoors on an obviously beautiful sunny day and then darkening the entire picture so that it (supposedly) looks like the actors are in the middle of a storm. Or maybe it was a technique designed to hide the poor make-up effects of the shark victims. It worked because you couldn’t see a thing. But drop a middle-aged Cousin Oliver (from the final six episodes of The Brady Bunch) in for a brief appearance and it will buy you quite a bit of goodwill.

The film was directed by writer/producer/editor/make-up effects specialist Anthony C. Ferrante, known for such TV movies as Leprechaun’sRevenge and Para-Homeless Activity, who here oversees some of the best visual effects that a month’s worth of sperm bank visits can buy. He is attentive to the nuances and subtleties that a movie about sharks getting chainsawed out of the air has to embrace. The action in Sharknado is in just about the most perfect hands one could imagine. At the end of the film the credits roll just like they did in Gandhi. But also just like they did in Mansquito.