Site news: you can now listen to Beth and Louise Hate Movies on iTunes! The first episode is out with The Movies We Hate the Most, but stay tuned for upcoming episodes. http://tinyurl.com/n4zjdxrIn the meantime, here's Louise with a review of SyFy's Twitter-fueled, Z-list hit, Sharknado.
To start: I know I’m supposed to hate Sharknado. In case you managed to dodge the Twitterfest and subsequent press coverage of this movie, Sharknado is a Syfy original movie about an apocalyptic storm that, yes, sucks sharks out of the ocean into a cyclone and drops them onto bystanders in LA. The heroes of the film, led by Tara Reid and her character’s ex-husband, have no choice to bomb the tornados from a helicopter, thus destroying the cyclone but apparently none of the buildings that they may accidentally hit in the process. Also, presumably dropping thousands of sharks onto LA once the funnel clouds recede.
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I won’t bore you by pointing out plot holes in Shaknado, because to do so might imply the writers cared at all about telling a coherent story. They did not. This is a film that doesn’t care about plot, characterization, biology, physics, or sound editing. What this movie actually cares about it being the sort of film you’ll riff Mystery Science Theater 3000-style on your iPhone with the hashtag #sharknado so they are guaranteed a budget for the sequel.
Make no mistake: When this film is trying to be a new camp classic, it is laugh-out-loud funny. The sharks, for example, act less like fish than like giant wind-up toys whose mouths constantly chomp, whether they are zooming through a tornado or being dropped onto a waterless freeway. The most hilarious shot of the film is in its climax, when we see an actual sharknado full of about 15,000 sharks chomping at nothing, instead of gasping for air, thrashing around, or doing anything else a fish might do out of water. When people get eaten in this movie, it’s usually because they’ve been sucked into a shark’s mouth, which muches as indiscriminately as a wood chipper. In one fantastic sequence, a man is eaten on the freeway when a shark is dropped mouth-first onto his head, presumably cramming the whole unchewed man directly into its stomach. The only way to improve these great campy moments—like when the hero chainsaws himself and another woman out of a shark’s insides—is if all the sharks were undead. And if Tara Reid was a Nazi.
But the moments of unbridled campy joy are few and far between, and in the interim, we are treated to the laziness of the director, writer, and all the actors involved. At least forty-five minutes of this movie is raw stock footage -- extended clips of people we never meet on surfboards, or sharkless waves crashing onto the California highways. The CGI sharks look like they’re created on StickDraw, and even then, the images are continually reused. Sure, this is a bad film. But worse yet, it’s a boring film, meaning it never quite grabs the “so bad it’s good” brass ring.
The best “so bad they’re good” films are the ones that are unflinchingly sincere in their acting and writing, without so much as a wink at the camera to acknowledge that any of the actors are in on the joke. I’m thinking of gems such as Russ Meyer and Roger Epert’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which, if you haven’t seen it, is an absolute disaster of a B-movie exploitation romp. Meyer and Epert wrote this masterpiece as they went, which means that the grand finale is completely unshadowed. This would normally not be a huge deal; however, in the finale of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls a presumably male character is suddenly revealed to be a woman, then proceeds to behead his/her costar with a sword while the 20th Century Fox fanfare plays. The film, like Sharknado, has no coherent plot or desire to comply with basic science. But unlike Sharknado, this film, and other so-bad-it’s-good gems, has no cynicism; even minute of it ham-fisted, overblown, and entirely sincere in its B-movie terribleness (see also: The Room). I was never bored while watching this movie because, instead of checking my watch, I was instead wondering, “Is this a joke? Are these people seriously not in on the joke?”
Sharknado, on the other hand, is a watch-checker. It is an awful, inexcusable mess of a movie. But most offensively, it is lazy, cynical, and insincere in its awfulness. Unlike Dolls or The Room, this is not a movie that cares about entertaining us. Instead, it cares a great deal about generating a good hashtag, which it accomplishes in the title card. From there, its only goal to do is create a larger audience for itself, with more Tweets and more Facebook comments. Apparently it worked. The sequel has already been greenlit.
Don’t add to the conversation. I wish I hadn’t.
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