As you really ought to know by this
point if you read my articles regularly, I have an unashamed love for
a very special kind of movie: the kind that doesn't try to be “good”
in an academic sense, but knows just what it wants to be, and goes
all out to achieve it. Machete, Shoot 'Em Up, Mega Shark vs. Giant
Octopus, all of them would make the head of a pretentious film buff
explode like the guy from Scanners, but I always find my enjoyment of
just how ridiculous they can get outmatches any sense of snobbish
dislike.
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| The shark did WHAT to that airplane? |
So you can imagine that I was pumped
for the premiere of “Sharknado”. How could I not be? It was a
tornado made of sharks rampaging across the west coast. Its the kind
of idea that I wish Michael Bay had done Transformers to secretly
fund. The day that the movie came out, twitter exploded. Everyone,
including big names in Hollywood, were going on about the horrible
wonders of “Sharknado.” I was doing other things at the time of
the premiere, so I recorded it, and sat to to watch it the next day.
Now, there are some good things and bad
things about this movie. Here's the good things in one picture:
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| Yes, this a man diving at a shark with a chainsaw. All your arguments are invalid. |
That is one of the most glorious images
that any movie has produced. There are a couple of things like that
in Sharknado, things that make you just stare blankly at your screen
and say “...what?”. Those are the good parts.
Sadly, there aren't that many of them.
Frankly, you needed to watch this movie
during the twitter storm, not just because the tweets themselves were
entertaining, but because it would give you something to do during
the incredibly slow parts of the film. That's right: a film called
“Sharknado” dragged like crazy at times.
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| Science still has no answers as to how this can be. |
Asylum Pictures also tends to fall flat
when it comes to immersion and world building. By “fall flat” of
course, I mean something more like face planting into jagged spikes
after a failed attempt at jumping a ramp on a barely working
motorcycle that they “fixed up” in their garage because they
“totally knew what they were doing.”
In movies like “Mega Shark vs Giant
Octopus” it wasn't that bad. In Sherlock Holmes it was absolutely
film-breaking. Here, its even worse. Supposedly flooded streets are
seen perfectly dry (with cars still driving along them) in the
background, and the idea that there is a hurricane going on is
diminished slightly by the fact that it is clearly bright and sunny
out. Come on guys, you couldn't even take the time to lower the
brightness on your footage a little?
I know that being cheesy is supposed to
be part of the fun, but to laugh at the ridiculousness of a
situation, you have to be able to have the slightest belief that the
situation is happening. Here, I never got that. It was a bunch of
people panicking at a hurricane that was so clearly not present that
it took you out of it.
Worst of all, there was a grave lack of
both sharks and tornadoes in this film. Shame on you.
