Happy Memorial Day! And with the unofficial start of summer, that means it’s officially shark season. Welcome to An Honest Fangirl’s Hot Shark Summer Festival Extravaganza of 2025! (As always, the name is still pending.)
To kick things off, we’re starting with an iconic series: Sharknado.
There’s really two things that you need to talk about when it comes to this movie: the movie itself and the reaction when it came out.
The movie itself is... well, it’s about a massive waterspout that sucks up hundreds of sharks and then dumps them all over Los Angeles. It’s a Syfy Original made by The Asylum for $1 million during an 18-day shoot. Ian Ziering said that he reluctantly agreed to play protagonist Fin Shepard to ensure that his family qualified for the Screen Actors Guild health insurance. The tagline on the poster is “Enough said!”
It’s an accurate tagline. It’s one of those movies that you just kind of gesture at and shrug and say “Yeah, it’s exactly what you think it’s going to be.” It opens with shark fin smugglers getting eaten by flying sharks and it ends with Fin diving into a shark’s mouth and cutting his way out with a chainsaw. At some point, they toss bombs into the sharknados to try and destroy them.
Enough said.
The CGI actually isn’t totally horrendous, especially when you take in consideration the budget and compare it to similar shark attack movies. You get to see a lot of sharks too. Granted, this might only be for a second or two as they fly across the screen, leaving only a red blur where a character once stood, but you see them! And it’s not just the same four or five repeated shots, either.
Okay, it is when it comes to the stock footage of actual sharks, but at least the CGI ones were a little more varied.
The acting is B-movie level, as is the script. Everyone is a stock character, and the order that they die in is incredibly predictable. You won’t really care when they die since you’ll probably be too busy laughing at the ridiculousness on screen. Again, this is a movie about a sharknado.
Still, I have to give everyone involved credit: they do commit to the bit. It feels like they genuinely tried to make a fun movie. It’s a ridiculous premise, it’s acknowledged as a ridiculous premise, but there’s no winking and nudging to the audience. It’s played very sincerely, which is the right move. Anything else would just come off as a cynical cash grab, but this is truly a “so bad it’s good” movie that’s fun to watch with friends. Especially after a few drinks.
But Sharknado wasn’t just a silly but fun Syfy movie that came out and then swiftly faded into nothingness like so many others that came both before and after it.
It went viral.
More specifically, it went viral on Twitter in a way that no other movie had done before. Celebrities like Olivia Wilde, Patton Oswald, and Damon Lindelof were tweeting about it, praising and heckling it in equal measure. Cory Monteith’s last tweet before he died was about Sharknado.
It became a cultural event. It was the first time that Twitter had latched on to a movie in such a way where everyone was reacting to it and having fun together. The response was so unexpected that there were several newspieces in the following days that reported on it and tried to get to the bottom of why this particular movie set the internet aflame.
The initial premiere had below average ratings (1.37 million viewers versus an average of 1.5 million). Thanks to the renewed attention from Twitter, Syfy decided to repeat it a week later. This time, it had 1.89 million viewers. A third showing the week after that had 2.1 million viewers, setting the record for an encore performance of a Syfy Original.
It ultimately went on to spawn five more movies of varying quality, as well as two spin-off movies. Yeah, those Lavalantula movies? They’re spin-offs. I didn’t know that either. Because nothing says tornado sharks like lava spiders.
But I'm starting to get snarky, and I genuinely don't want to treat this movie like that. No, it isn't good. At all. But it is ridiculous and sincere and if nothing else, it gave me some really great memories watching it with my younger brothers.
Random Thoughts
I really hate that the main character's name is Fin. Even if it's short for Finley. It's neither cute nor clever, although some might argue with me about that.
I don't know when or if I'm going to review the rest of the series. I remember really enjoying the second one when it came out, but I'm pretty sure all of the others degraded quickly in quality. We'll see!
And on that note, if you have any shark movies that you want me to review this summer, let me know! I'm always more than happy to take requests and they can't be any worse than Cocaine Shark.
... Please don't try to find me a worse movie than Cocaine Shark.
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An Honest Fangirl loves video games, horror movies, and superheroes, and occasionally watches far too many shark movies.
Enough said! And as a catch phrase, that's hilarious. :)
ReplyDeleteWoo-hoo Hot Shark Summer!
ReplyDeleteIn the upcoming season 2.5, Marvel Rivals is adding a team up move for Storm and Jeff the lank shark called 'Jeff-Nado' which makes the timing of your article on this movie serendipitous, and highly amusing to boot.
ReplyDelete