New To Blu: Sharknado

I wish I could have sat in on the board meeting that gave birth to Sharknado. A bunch of old guys in suits sitting around trying to figure out how to make the most money with the least amount of effort.  “Kids these days like disaster movies, right?  How can we make them more relevant to the Internet crowd?  Anyone?!” A man sitting in the back of the room leans back with a smirk on his face.  He rolls up the sleeves on his plaid shirt and pushes his black-rimmed glasses up his nose. “Sharks, dude. You gotta have sharks.”  Thus, the concept of sharks being sucked up into a tornado was born, and it was not good.  SyFy channel makes their living financing movies like these. We already had to endure Sharktopus, so I suppose this is the logical next step.  It is a hilarious idea on paper but unfortunately it doesn’t deliver, even as a B-movie.

The plot is paper-thin and while I’m not going to argue about scientific accuracy in a movie about a tornado with sharks in it, they could have tried just a little bit to have it make sense. There is a lot of inane filler and not enough giant sharks eating people. It’s actually a very boring film and I found myself drifting away at several points.  The “sharknado” is entirely CG and horrible CG at that. It would have been cool to see a few animatronic sharks used for the close-up shots but I’m sure they didn’t have the budget for it. The actors are the usual suspects of unknowns and washed up stars that needed a quick paycheck. Tara Reid is especially terrible and I can see why she hasn’t been in anything meaningful since American Pie. This movie just looks and sounds mediocre and it tries to carry itself on the concept alone which doesn’t cut it.


If there is one thing I hate, it’s being pandered to by companies. For some reason our generation loves randomness and while that can sometimes work if done correctly, more often than not it turns out to be pure drivel.  This movie reminds me of Snakes on a Plane, another random Internet humor style movie, except Snakes on a Plane was better at being tongue-in-cheek and actually put some effort into the film (and had Samuel L. Jackson).  Sharknado did well in the ratings, thanks to Twitter/Internet hype, and made enough money for a sequel, so maybe this is what the people want to see. I just wish the studio had cared enough to really run with it and got some real comedy writers to make it a cult classic.

-Review by Michelle Kisner