Say It Loud, Say It Proud

The Sharknado spinning in my own home.

There comes a time in everyone’s life when the burden of pretending to be something you are not becomes too onerous. And so it was with me and SHARKNADO. Yes, it’s cheesy. Yes, it’s ridiculous. Yes, it’s dumb. The beauty part, though, is that it sets out to be all that and more. There is an artistry of sorts, not high artistry, but a certain necessary flair, needed to pull off a movie that is so bad it’s good. I This met the threshold. I didn’t just live-tweet the sequel last week, I also re-watched it this week.

Ian Ziering flying through a waterspout of epic proportions surrounding by flailing, snapping sharks intent on his demise, that, I fear, is never going to get old. Especially since there is a chainsaw involved. That the special effects are as cheesy as the film itself only heightens the experience.

The people behind SHARKNADO, and it’s even sillier sequel, SHARKNADO 2: THE NEXT ONE, seize cliches and inside jokes and hyperbole and proceed to mold them into a delightful concretion that winks at the audience while never quite cracking a smile. They are not trying to impress us with anything more than an ability to make us laugh, and that they do. There is, dare I say it, a certain noble purity in purveying something that bills itself for exactly what it is, pure, unadulterated, even giddy, schlock unspooled with an irony that eschews the usual cynicism associated with that trope.

Mock if you will, but the single best definition of a good movie I ever heard was this, do you want to see what happens next. If the answer is yet, it’s worth watching, even when it’s a glorious camp fest such as this. Maybe, just maybe, it’s >BECAUSE< it’s such a glorious camp fest.  

The attached audio below features my cohort, Tim Sika of Celluloiddreams.net, Brian Pelletier, ace radio producer at KGO radio here in San Francisco, and myself trying to explain to show host, and scintillatingly funny stand-up comedien, Maureen Langan why we three are so fanatically devoted to all things SHARKNADO. We fail, but I say we sent down swinging (chainsaws).