Sharknado: I Want 1 Hour and 57 Minutes of My Life Back!

For the last decade, the Syfy channel has had a string of very solid original, scripted tv shows. Starting with Battlestar Galactica, the network has churned out surprisingly high quality shows such as Eureka, Sanctuary, Warehouse 13, Haven, Being Human, and most recently Defiance. Yet for the quality they put into scripted television, the network also seems to take a sick sort of pride in their weekly, low budget/quality made-for-tv movies (many of which would make even the cast of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 go nuts).

I generally avoid these movies, but every once in a while, one of them is so ridiculous that I can’t help but watch it. The most recent one off the wall enough to catch my attention is Sharknado. With the tagline in the commercial being “Sharks…Tornado…SHARKNADO…’Enough Said” how am I supposed to NOT watch this?

Fast forward 2 hours, and I want about 1 hour and 57 minutes of my life back that I will never get. I hoped that this movie would be so bad that it was good, like 2012’s Sharktopus. However, Sharknado could not acheive this level of entertainment, and was just plain awful. The novelty of the poor CG on the sharks got old really quick. The acting was bad, but not funny bad (including lead performances by Tara Reid and Ian Ziering). The lighting of scenes was very inconsistent, which I’m not sure how that happens when a good chunk of the movie takes place on a sunny beach (though this may have been my tv trying to correct color).

Two thirds of the way through the movie, and I wanted to give up, but I had made it this far, and had to see how it ended, if for nothing else, to painfully write this review. The last quarter of the movie actually had a single joke that made me laugh where when someone asks why there is a retirement home right next to an airport, the answer is that old people can’t hear. After this, they introduced chainsaws into the mix, which lead to two separate shark fights that can both be deemed as EPIC!

I am a guy that can appreciate B-Horror movies (I used to love getting those cheesy movies from Blockbuster that always had the holgram covers, like Jack Frost: The Mutant Killer Snowman), but my final verdict on Sharknado is that it’s not worth your time. Don’t invest 2 hours of your life when you’re only going to get approximately 3 minutes of real entertainment out of it.  I was hoping for another Sharktopus, and all I got was disappointment.