What do you get when you cross a tornado with hundreds of irrationally pissed-off sharks? You get Sharknado, a gleeful exercise in absurdity. As the caption on the cover says, “Enough said!”
If you’ve not yet come across Sharknado, you should spend more time on the internet. It’s kind of a thing. (Here’s hoping that they use “Sharknado… it’s kind of a thing” as a reviewer quote on the poster for the sequel.) It was released in 2013, made for the Syfy channel, and gained a cult following through word-of-mouth on social media.
You can probably work out the general premise just from the title; a freak hurricane, dubiously justified by global warming, causes sharks to rain down upon Los Angeles, and nothing makes sense from then on. It takes a special kind of talent to have a film with flying sharks in, and manage to out-ridiculous it in other parts. From the cheesy one-liners (“My mom always told me Hollywood would kill me!” [Crushed by Hollywood sign]), to the flimsy back-stories (“Sharks took my grandfather, so I really hate sharks”), to the bizarre action sequences (at one point, a swimming pool at an old people’s home is set fire to and then explodes), this is a film that can’t quite be put into words. Apart from these ones I’ve done, of course.
They all decide that the way to get rid of the multiple sharknados is to throw explosives into them. This is a pretty typical American reaction; there’s a complicated threat, so let’s just bomb it. I’m surprised they didn’t preface the bombing by claiming that the tornados “hate our freedom”, and that the final scene didn’t depict a shark being water-boarded in Guantanamo Bay until it confessed to being best friends with Osama Bin Laden.
There are some great films which you might watch, mildly enjoy, and never think of again. A so-bad-it’s-good film can have you screaming with laughter at your television and give you the immediate impulse to share it with everyone you have met. However, the thing which bothers me is that I think the makers of Sharknado know this, and I think they deliberately exploited it. Sometimes, when I’m in one of my conspiracy-believer tin-foil-hat-wearer moods, I wonder whether bad things are being made intentionally because they are more of a shared experience for people than good things.
In the music world, there are countless arty types who finely craft their songs, and might have released some kind of folk/trip-hop concept album about economic disparity in Western society. But are they ever going to be more important to the general public than Rebecca Black’s “Friday”? Sharknado knows this- nothing is this absurd by accident- and in a sense it’s pretty cynically made.
This attitude in itself, however, is cynical in itself. Most people won’t watch this film and criticise glib filmmaking; they will laugh at the flying sharks and then probably Tweet about it. And that, at the end of the day, is what light entertainment is all about.