Sharknado (2013)

This post is dedicated to Matt.  Thank you for drawing my attention to this "movie," and thus "enriching" my life.

"You know, I have one simple request.  And that is to have sharks with laser beams attached to their heads!"  So said Dr. Evil, and we all laughed, because such a thing was clearly ludicrous and stupid.  It was funny.

Now the entire concept of stupid has a movie.  That movie is Sharknado.

From the people that brought us such stellar and cerebral films as Sharktopus (it's a shark!  It's an octopus!  It's both!) and Dinoshark comes Sharknado, the latest travesty to challenge Plan 9 from Outer Space for the honor of being Worst Movie Ever.

It's a tornado!  It's sharks!  It's a sharknado!

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I did not watch Sharknado.  I did, however, watch a few clips and read a summary.  The clips were pretty much all the action stuff with the titular tornado-composed-of sharks.  From what I saw I'm fairly confident that I don't want to injure my brain by watching the "plot development" or "character development" parts.

This then is what I saw:

• A guy was skeetshooting sharks out of the air with a pistol.  100 pound sharks, knocked out of the air because they were hit by a pistol round.  Not anything about the previous two sentences makes the least bit of sense.
• There was a shark biting through the roof of a car to get at the people inside.  As though a shark's first thought wouldn't be "how can I get back in the water?"  No, of course if a shark was yanked out of the water by a tornado and thrown on a moving car it's immediate reaction would be "I need to get to the chewy center of this Chevy."
• A guy used a chainsaw to slice a shark in half lengthwise instead of being eaten.  Giant shark, hurled at 100 mph at some dude, but because he held a chainsaw it was instantly sliced in half.  Cool?  No.
• Once on land, the sharks were crawling toward people.  I'm not even kidding.  Those same people were seemingly powerless to get away.
• If someone fell down, sharks would land on top of them to eat them.
• Sharks in the tornado could control their movement and fly.
• Sharks exploding when contacting a powerline.
• Sharks roared like lions.  'Cause sharks have lungs to do that.

Somewhere out there a guy wrote this mess.  Then some other guy decided to spend money to make it.  Actors destroyed their career by being in it (not that they had any ability anyway, as this movie ably demonstrates).  And now people everywhere are passing up the opportunity to see good movies to watch this stupidity instead.  That's just sad to me.

And they are making a sequel.  Sharknado 2.  Evidently it gets sharknadoier.  Perhaps it could have ninja sharks or something.  Inevitably there will be the spin offs Earthquack (an earthquake causes the ground to become ducks!) TigerWave (a tsunami carries a ship full of deadly tigers into the heart of the city!  Splash Roar Argh!) and Volecano (it's an eruption of lava!  No, it's an eruption of small rodents that will ruin our lawns!  Oh the humanity!)

Entertainment: no.
Artistic Value: sharknado. (that means none)
Technical merit: they should be ashamed.

Overall: j out of pink.  (meaning: there is no way to give a serious rating to this.  Avoid at all costs.)

P.S. The question of the day: if movies have to compete to be the dumbest just to get people to like them, have we concluded that our culture is bankrupt and decadent?  Is art dead?