Sharknado

There are good movies, there are bad movies, there are some movies that are so bad that they're actually really enjoyable... and then there are movies like Sharknado. It's a film that aims to capture that 'so-bad-it's-good' badge of honor but fails miserably. 

The movie's plot centers around exactly what the title would suggest; a tornado (or more accurately 3 tornados) that has picked up hundreds of sharks and thrust them upon the southern California coast. This has apparently pissed off all the sharks, because they're only goal is to shred every person they come across to bits. So, it's up to a ragtag group of bad actors to drop explosives into the tornados.

I debated whether or not to give this movie a 0 out of 5 but, I have watched it start to finish so it doesn't earn that 'unwatchable' tag. The acting is bad, the script is bad, the VFX are bad... I know that it was intentionally made this way, but that doesn't make the viewing experience any more enjoyable in my mind.

  1 out of 5

70's Month - Day:15 Jaws

I couldn't go through a month of 70's movies without dedicating one of the days to Jaws. Spielberg's 1975 masterpiece about a great white shark terrorizing the people of Amity Island on 4th of July weekend became one of the biggest hits of the 1970's and is still the gold-standard of shark films. I'll keep this short and I'm not going to bother to go into the plot with this one because...well, it's Jaws. It's great, you've probably seen it and if not, find it and watch it. Unlike so many of the shark movies that would follow over the decades Jaws really isn't driven by carnage and kills, but rather by tension and memorable characters. Even though the mechanical shark does look a bit dated today, the performances of Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss, combined with an iconic John Williams theme help maintain Jaws' status as a 'must-see' film more than 40 years after it's initial release.
5 out of 5

Shark Night (2011)

There are a ton of shark movies out there but, oddly enough, there's only one good one: Jaws. When it comes to all other shark films they range from terrible to just ok. Now, obviously this isn't a great movie like Jaws, and you shouldn't expect that going in. However, it also lacks the 'so bad it's good' charm of a movie like Ghost Shark.

Shark Night starts out on the right track with a shark attack in the first scene. Unfortunately, it then cuts to a college campus and over the next 20mins nothing interesting happens. We're given the setup; a group of friends are going to a lake house for the weekend -AND- we're introduced to all the complex, nuanced characters, like Hot Girl, Black Guy, Comic Relief, and others. Of course they're not at the lake house long before the first shark attack and, to the film's credit, the pacing is pretty good from this point on. Now you may be wondering 'why is a lake full of vicious sharks?' Well, it's a saltwater lake and the bad guys filled it with several different species of shark so they could film the attacks and make some money off it. 

The plot is dumb, as it is in most shark flicks, and the deaths are predictable. It's a PG-13 movie which is kind of ironic since the villain's plan is to give people real footage of vicious attacks, and yet the movie is pretty tame. 

I'd recommend skipping this one.

1.5 out of 5