Sharknado

Oh boy.  Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.  It had to happen.  When your the name The Asylum, what comes to your mind?  Bottom of the barrel, low-budget sci-fi channel crapfests, right?  That's EXACTLY what The Asylum produces.  Mega Piranha, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, Battle of Los Angeles and Snakes on a Train, just to name a few.  A lot of these films were designed to released on the coattails of certain big screen movies like the Piranha remake, Snakes on a Plane and Battle: Los Angeles.  For most of them, they are irredeemably bad.  Not even so bad they're good.  Most of them are just plain crap.  But every once in a blue moon, The Asylum releases a trailer teasing certain movies that are just so batshit crazy, you think to yourself: "Okay, I've gotta see that."  Mega Piranha was one such movie, and Sharknado is the other.

Story?  What?  Who cares?!  With a movie title like "Sharknado," are you really going into this expecting Citizen Kane?  All everybody needs to know is that a hurricane is forcing thousands of sharks towards the shores of California and are picked up and thrown by tornadoes.  And people ending up becoming lunch for the fish.  That's all you need to know.  It's just a way of explaining the insanity that happens on screen.  And it is insanity.  I suppose it's appropriate for a movie like this to be released by a studio called The Asylum.  It doesn't take long before things start going crazy on the beach, and then it just spills over(literally)into downtown Los Angeles, the Hamptons and an airport.  For a movie that was direct to TV, it's surprisingly bloody.  People are torn to shreds as you would expect in a shark movie.  But when sharks are swimming down streets and seen flying into signs and electric wires, you have to wonder?  What were these guys at Asylum smoking, and where can I get some?

Okay, let's get serious(not likely), what's bad about this movie? The acting, Ian Zeiring of 90210 fame is in the lead, Tara Reid plays his wife. John Heard plays the requisite drunkard, and Cassandra Scerbo plays the gorgeous love interest who hates sharks.  Yeah, the acting's bad, but most of these people are clearly in on the joke and are having a fantastic time, except for Tara Reid, who has as much talent as a rock.  The acting's bad, but it manages to entertain.  The visual effects?  Oh, dear god.  The CGI is just plain....WOW.  It's bad.  Again, it's par for the course with The Asylum.  However:  It's insane the amount of crap the manage to get on the screen.  If the CGI was better, it probably wouldn't send the message that this movie is nuts nearly as well.  There's definitely stuff in here that's just of the WTF variety.  Flying a helicopter next to a tornado and throwing bombs into it to destroy it?  Yeah, no.  Science?  That's out of the window.  Physics?  Also gone.  But then again, with a movie like this, you shouldn't expect ANY of that in the first place.

Any good stuff?  Uh....it doesn't take itself too seriously, but seriously enough that it doesn't come across as a blatant comedy.  It's also not boring.  It's fairly well-paced, leaving drama and the serious family dynamics out of the picture, for the most part.  It doesn't take long to get from one action scene to another.  There's that.  Oh, and the song when the credits roll is awesome.

Sharknado got a whole ton of press, this thing was hyped from when it was announced.  It was on Twitter, Facebook and all over the internet.  It even actually managed to get a limited THEATRICAL release.  No other movie from The Asylum can claim that.  Everybody's been talking about it.  Even people who don't watch movies or have internet have heard of this movie.  Are the people who hate this movie wrong?  Not at all.  On the contrary, they are very much correct.  It's a terrible movie.  Bad acting, bad special effects, lousy story; hell, lousy everything, except for the song on the end credits, that was awesome.  You can't really argue with people that give this movie a bad review. It's earned, and that I think is why it's popular.  It knows it's bad and goes full throttle, you're either with it or you're not.  Let's give this thing a score:
Acting: 4/10
Effects: 2/10
Story: What?
Concept: 8/10
Song on the End Credits: 15/10
Awesomeness Factor: 10/10.
Overall: 9/10.  I loved every minute of it.