By Back in 2013, my family and I sat down to watch a movie that all of my friends were going nuts over online, calling it one of the dumbest movies of all time. It became a media sensation on Twitter, had multiple showings on the Syfy Channel, and even got a theatrical release for some bizarre reason. It was one of the movies that defined the summer of 2013 and that movie was Sharknado, a movie that asked what happens if a tornado full of sharks was let loose on California.
I don’t think I’m shocking anyone when I say that the Sharknado series is bad. For God’s sake, it’s a Syfy original movie about killer sharks in tornadoes starring Ian Ziering. But all of the Sharknado movies have had their charm to them, whether it was from glorious deaths, the celebrity cameos, or just waiting to see what new spawn of madness will come on screen. Every year since then, my family and I have watched our yearly Sharknado movie with bated breath, laughing at how dumb, amateurish, but overall entertaining each movie was. Now that we’re at The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time, which I’m going to call Sharknado 6 cause I don’t want to write the ridiculously long title every time, I think it’s finally time to put the series to bed.
The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time
Director: Anthony C. Ferrante
Rated: N/A
Release Date: August 19th, 2018
It’s kind of hard to describe just what happens in Sharknado 6 because the movie simultaneously does and doesn’t care about the overall plot. The premise is that Finn Sheppard, played by Ian Zeiring, needs to go back in time to stop the first Sharknado in order to end all Sharknadoes and that’s about all the plot we get. It’s just an excuse to see the characters fight sharks in Prehistoric Times, the Middle Ages, the Revolutionary War, the Wild West, the 1950’s, and even the far off future. I have no idea how all of those Sharknadoes can be the first Sharknado, but I can acknowledge that it’s just an attempt and changing up the action a little bit.
What bothers me is that halfway through the movie, they start bringing up characters and motivations from the first Sharknado movie, AKA, the one that’s boring cause it doesn’t go off the rails. 15 minutes of the movie is spent on Nova, a side character in the first movie, wishing that she could change the past because her grandpa died from a shark attack, a fact which was brought up only a handful of times in the first movie then never mentioned again. Why bring it up now in the last movie? Hell, why make it a fundamental part of the final movie in the series when no one remembers or cares about it?
Plot should never be the focus in a movie like Sharknado 6. The title really does speak for itself. You came here for a stupid shark movie, end of story. I don’t care that there are two Tara Reid’s walking around and one of them is a decapitated cyborg head, I just want to see them kill sharks! Why mess up what’s been good for so long?
When the movie is set on showing us intense shark action, it doesn’t disappoint though. We have sharks fighting dinosaurs, robot sharks, fire-breathing sharks, and my personal favorite, sharks with guns. If you just want to see sharks kill a bunch of people in increasingly dumb ways, then you’re all set.
If you wanted to see random celebrities fight and kill sharks, you may be a bit sad to hear that there really aren’t many great cameos this time around. Sure, Sharknado has always consisted of Z-list celebrity appearances, but there seem to be even fewer than before. We have Gilbert Gottfried, Dee Snyder, Alaska from Rue Paul’s Drag Race, Ben Stein, and Neil Degrasse Tyson, and those were the only ones that I noticed. It was great seeing Neil Degrasse Tyson as Merlin fly on a pterodactyl, and I will treasure that image until I die, but I wished that there were more celebrities popping in only to die in hilarious ways like the previous movies.
Make no mistake, Sharknado 6 is a bad movie, but I’m trying to figure out if it’s enjoyably bad. There are times where I was laughing at how stupid it was, but there were a lot of points where I thought that this was just a bad Syfy Channel original movie. I never had that feeling when watching the other movies in the franchise. This felt like a B-movie that MST3K would tear apart back in their heyday and I don’t mean that as a compliment.
Then again, unlike a majority of the movies that we review here, this movie is free to watch, You can catch it on the Syfy Channel on reruns pretty regularly, so you’re not wasting valuable dollars on a crappy movie. If you’re one of the few people that actually care about the Sharknado franchise, this is strictly mid-tier. It’s not annoyingly bad as the fourth one, but it’s not gloriously bonkers like the second one. It’s a bad movie with some laughs, some action, but a lot of underwhelming moments.
I want to watch all the Sharknado movies back to back and do a full-length feature on it to really dissect if it’s a legitimate so-bad-it’s-good franchise, but as it stands, Sharknado 6 is just ho-hum. I can live with it, I can live without it. It does put a nice bow on the franchise and closes everything out in the most confusing way possible, but I can’t deny I had fun.
