Movie Review: Sharknado (2013)

Synopsis: As a powerful storm, brought on by global warming, strikes the coast of California and Los Angeles, a retired professional surfer (with help from his friends) attempts to rescue his ex-wife and children both from flooding and from dozens of hungry sharks that are being scooped up from the ocean and dropped on land.

Who's in it? The movie stars Ian Ziering, Tara Reid, John Heard, Cassandra Scerbo and Jason Simmons.

Review: This is a movie that I've been on the fence about watching for the past four years, mostly because I'm not a big fan of horror/comedies, especially those that would be considered low budget. In fact, the only reason I decided to finally watch it last night was I had heard there is yet another sequel (the 5th movie total) coming out and I found myself a bit curious about what I was missing.

As it turns out, after watching this movie last night, I can honestly say there wasn't anything about this movie that surprised me. However, I will also admit I ended up enjoying this movie more than I thought I would.

This movie is, in essence, what you would expect it to be. It has crappy special effects, over-the-top acting and a storyline that was, at times, a bit choppy (as though the editors were more concerned about hitting a specific run time and less concerned about where they trimmed the film). And, that's not even counting the fact the movie premise itself is a bit far-fetched (it's about as believable as mutant tomatoes attacking the city).

That being said, there was, admittedly, something appealing about this movie regardless. I think the best way to describe it is, it was so bad, I felt the need to keep watching, even as it starting to get very predictable toward the end.

My only real complaint about this movie, surprisingly, is the daughter (Aubrey Peeples). This is mostly because, other than being a drama queen and complaining about her dad (Ziering) at the most inappropriate times, she doesn't seem to have a real purpose (Tara Reid's character was just as useless but at least had the potential love interest thing going for her). In other words, she's one of those characters that could have been left out of the final cut and nobody would have noticed she was missing. I hate characters like that because their screen time could have been given to the more interesting characters instead.

Final Opinion: I'm still undecided about watching the sequels. However, this movie proved to be more entertaining than I thought it would be and, at least based on that, I will give it a passing grade.

My Grade: B