Film Review - B Movie - Sharknado

Sharknado is a sci-fi horror film with comedic elements. It was a film made for television directed by Anthony C. Ferrante.

The premise for this film is that a freak cyclone has dragged sharks out of the sea and is dropping them over the city of Los Angeles. Such a ridiculous premise would never garner a large budget  that you see many Hollywood films getting, which is why this movie can be considered as a 'B Movie' with a budget of only $2 million. None of the actors are too famous but provide an interesting and diverse cast with contrasting characteristics. This film (at least for me) never had any real immersion due to the low quality cgi and the ridiculousness of the premise. But it was still entertaining nonetheless. Often coming off as cheesy, this film has all the characteristics of a typical B movie, where acting and special effects are suboptimal by the standard of the time period in which it is released. Throughout the film there are obviously fake sharks floating around the city and the actors trying their best to remain serious have to confront them as they present obstacles.

 However this is where some of the comedy comes from. Where it appears the actors are trying to remain serious it is impossible not to crack a smile at points in the film. This is a film that has taken a full on approach to the fact that it is low budget and silly at its core, and acknowledges that. In this sense it is very meta compared to earlier B Movies, which attempted to be serious films but failed. The directors clearly made this with the knowledge that they simply don't have the money to make this plotline immersive. In a way the comedy derives from this fact of an otherwise serious but poorly made hour and a half of ridiculousness. 

In summary these are what I see as the 5 redeeming qualities of this film:

1. The contrast of serious acting with the poorly made and animated sharks creates a lot of humour as it makes it hard to take their acting serious.
2. Overly dramatic points in this film only emphasise the ridiculousness of the whole plot but somehow works to it's advantage, with at one point a woman giving a heartfelt sob story about why she hates sharks so much, which in the end comes off as insincere.
3. The rapid progression of the story again helps to show off the ridiculousness in the film. For a relatively short film, a lot happens in it. Constant action is upon the characters as they have to fight off sharks in increasingly ridiculous ways.
4. The actors while coming off as cheesy all actually help to that effect of the film. I would not say the acting is terrible as it is a hard film to act serious in. But it seems like a fitting cast of characters was placed in this film.
5. The over the top action scenes are definitely the best bit of the film. When sharks come flying out of the sky and bite a man's arm off, or when another man is shooting sharks in the sky and they fall down. It even progresses to a point where a man uses a chopper to fly into the sky and send missles into the shark infested cyclone. But the crown jewel is when the main character Fin (one of the cheesy puns from this film), jumps head first into a shark, that has come flying out from the sky, with a chainsaw in hand. The other characters think he is dead but then the chainsaw rips through the shark from the inside and Fin is revealed to be alive.