Sharknado (2013)

Director: Anthony C. Ferrante

Starring: Ian Ziering, Tara Reid, John Heard

When a freak hurricane swamps Los Angeles, nature’s deadliest killer rules sea, land, and air as thousands of sharks terrorize the waterlogged populace.

I’ve known about ‘Sharknado’ for a while, but was never interested in seeing it, knowing it to be a bad B-movie. One evening whilst browsing a streaming website, I decided to watch it, thinking I’d probably last about 10 minutes.

Well, 10 minutes became 20 and I ultimately found myself unable to stop watching. This was mainly due to the very handsome and hunky mail lead actors, Ian Ziering (especially!), and Jaason Simmons. Ian Ziering stars as the film’s protagonist, Fin Shepard, and Simmons is his best friend, Baz. (I confess to imagining the two of them in a gay porn movie!!)

The characters are your typical B-movie characters without much depth and the dialogue typically B-movie standard. This is by no means a great script, and the visuals – especially the sharks – are bad. Everything is what you expect a B-movie to look like. However, I just couldn’t stop watching. Despite being bad on almost every level, I strangely found it rather interesting, and very watchable.

There are some clever visual effects, and then some really bad. There’s also so many mistakes. In one scene a bus is only up to its wheels in the water, yet they show big sharks completely submerged swimming beside the bus!! There’s also so much over dramatization. Some scenes looked like they were filmed during rehearsals and then used in the film.

‘Sharknado’ is by no means trying to be another ‘Jaws’ or ‘Deep Blue Sea’, but I enjoyed the reference to ‘Jaws’ when a character said “We’re gonna need a bigger chopper.”. Ha-ha, funny! ‘Sharknado’ is a classic example of a film so bad, it’s entertaining! I enjoyed it much more than I ever thought possible.

‘Sharknado’ was followed by five sequels and a spin-off.

Would I watch it again? Probably, yes.