Three Films Make A Post: When it's red you're dead.

Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No (2015): Yeah, well, I kinda could have lived without this one. It’s not just that the sharknado jokes have grown kinda stale this time around (though I have to give the film points for actually going for sharknado Earth worldbuilding), it’s the addition of endless celebrity and politician cameos that drag this thing down, as well as the scenes that make a dubious advert for Universal’s stupid amusement park down in Florida. There’s also just only so many ways you can show Ian Ziering chainsaw a flying shark, alas.

Knock Knock (2015): I don’t think I’m ever going to get into the films of Eli Roth, and at this point, I don’t believe it’s my fault anymore. It is, in any case, a bit of a shame, for I don’t doubt there’s the talent in Roth to actually make great, or at least good movies. Visually, the man’s films are always slick, often inventive, and the man clearly has the basic’s of horror film and thriller structures down flat. The problem is he’s putting all these powers in service of films that are generally obnoxious, waste opportunities for depth by the dozen, and too often have the basic vibe of a visit to the world view and mind of a total asshat. So, as usual, this one consists of nasty things happening to characters the film never gives me a reason to care about, avoids all opportunities to say something interesting (or coherent) about class and gender wars while making pretentious gestures suggesting otherwise, and just isn’t compelling enough as a pure horror film to make it possible to ignore its vacuity.


Altergeist (2014): I actually found it a lot easier to squeeze a bit of enjoyment out of Tedi Sarafian’s (of those Sarafians) directorial debut. Not just because it’s easier to overlook the flaws in a first film but because this film – while not containing any more depth than Roth’s – does not pretend it’s any more than it is: a slick looking film about young, pretty internet ghost hunters getting very much out of their depth in a haunted winery and dying. That is, until the film’s final thirty minutes or so pull a different fortean rabbit out of the hat, and the ghosts become a mere sideshow to the true monsters. It’s all very silly, of course, but here, at least, I found myself having fun instead of becoming increasingly annoyed.

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Sharknado 2: The Second One (2014)

Well, one really can’t say Anthony C. Ferrante and his The Asylum brethren aren’t doing their damndest to top the first film here, with triple the sharknados, quadruple the useless cameos, New York replacing Los Angeles, and about ten times about as much stupidity included (which certainly must have taken special effort). The resulting film perhaps doesn’t have ten times the entertainment value, but if you can roll with the over-excited, a few times somewhat smug, stupidity of an opus that starts out with a sharknado induced near-plane crash that gets its “near” pre-fix from the first film’s returning surfer dudes hero’s first act of improbable (even in context of, you know, sharknados and the head of the Statue of Liberty running amuck) heroism, and gets increasingly deranged from there.

Apart from all the fighting against flying sharks (and one lone bonus New York Sewer alligator, though not a flying one), there’s a lot of the sort of cliché New Yorker-dom you expect from this sort of thing, the usual stuff about cab drivers, how awesome New York is supposed to be, and so on. Every second minor character is a cameo by someone from the freakshow by-ways of American popular culture, so expect sightings of mythical creatures like Kurt Angle, Andy Dick and Billy Ray Cyrus while Vivica A. Fox, Ian Ziering and Kari Wuhrer – A-list material all from this perspective - are trying to keep their faces straight.

The real surprise to me here is how watchable and entertaining the whole load of crap stays despite the cameos of people you really don’t want to be reminded of (though I as a European at least get the kick of pointing and laughing at those exotic whacky Americans here), though I’m pretty sure the third Sharknado later this year will be a piling steam of self-satisfied smugness and completely unwatchable. This one though, it’s easy enough to have fun with.

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SyFy vs. The Mynd: Sharknado (2013)

A historically bad hurricane hits the coast of California, bringing flooding, tornados and very hungry sharks in the process. Damn you, climate change! As you know, Jim, sharks like nothing more than moving into the streets and swimming pools of Beverly Hills. Nothing, that is, but flying around in a tornado to eat people.

Like all problems in the life of the USA, this too, can be solved by judicious use of explosions, an old-fashioned yet effective approach far superior to torture and hunting people around the world for committing journalism. But before the sharksplosion can happen, our designated hero, middle-aged surfer dude, bar owner and divorcee Fin (Ian Ziering), his side kick, Tasmanian surfer dude Baz (Jason Simmons), and shark-hating waitress Nova (Cassie Scerbo) have to take care of personal business, namely reaching Fin's ex-wife April (Tara Reid), and their kids Claudia (Aubrey Peeples) and Matt (Chuck Hittinger), saving people from the sharksmenace wherever they go. Will they do it in time? Who will be eaten first? (The alcoholic played by John Heard I didn't even mention). Will there ever be a SyFy movie with divorced people who don't get back together - or at least grow close again - thanks to alien invasions, the sasquatch, or flying sharks?

As regular readers of this blog (I'm so very, very sorry for everything, guys) will know, I generally loathe The Asylum and their approach to low budget knock-off genre cinema that unerringly leads them to making crappy movies that think winking at an audience and telling them how bad they are is irony, or films where the worst actor imaginable plays Sherlock Holmes in a way which makes Ianto from Torchwood look charismatic beside him, or films that don't realize that Robo-Hitler, gang rape, and forced abortion don't belong in the same movie, or films that are just plain boring because nobody involved had any ideas on how to fill the time between the two scenes that'll play good in trailers. In a surprising turn of events, The Asylum's Sharknado, as made by them for our old shameless friend, the SyFy Channel, and directed by Anthony C. Ferrante avoids all of these pitfalls.

In fact, one of the most enjoyable aspects of the movie is Ferrante's effective approach to the film's tone. It is obvious that everyone involved knows how utterly idiotic and clichéd (not to speak of making a mockery of science, logic, and possibly the American Way) the film's plot is, but instead of just pointing and laughing at itself, it plays much of what's going on in it straight, timing jokes so that they are actually funny, and pretending that a lot of the included absurdity (personal favourite: Ziering getting eaten by a shark, cutting himself free from the inside with a chainsaw, and also rescuing Scerbo, who had been swallowed by said shark while falling out of a helicopter, in the process) is really very earnest stuff; which is exactly why it becomes as funny as it is awesome. Turns out I get what a joke is even when the film isn't telling me.

Sharknado further endears itself to me by slowly escalating its silliness, starting off with comparatively mild stupidity like a ferris wheel rolling around to crush people and sharks swimming the streets, and slowly working itself up to the really idiotic/awesome stuff like people killing sharknados with explosions and cutting flying sharks out of the air with chainsaws. All the while, there's also some hoary disaster movie character stuff going on that never acknowledges the absurdity of the surrounding action for a second. It's truly beautiful in its conscious unconsciousness.

Plus, last but not least, Tara Reid has so little dialogue she doesn't even have enough space to invoke the depths of her lack of acting skill.

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