Movie Review: Sharknado on SyFy Channel

By Nathan Young on July 12, 2013

Oh boy! What was SyFy Channel thinking when they made Sharknado? Yes, I did watch much of this movie and boy was it interesting. The movie blew up social media; Syfy says the online feeding frenzy peaked at 5,000 tweets per minute and broke the network’s social media records. With 387,000 total tweets, the film came within 2,500 tweets of tying the Game of Thrones infamous “Red Wedding” episode. And I enjoyed reading many of the social media comments on Facebook and Twitter, boy were they funny!

You could tell that this movie was very low-budget, the acting was okay and some of the people in this movie will never get far in Hollywood. The computer graphics was very lousy. The sharks looked like a 10 year-old kid designed them. The shark attacks looked like they could have been prevented. Some people were so dumb to just stand there and get eaten by the sharks. And let’s talk about physics, how do sharks get sucked into a tornado voracity and fly around like that? Would the sharks be dead before they get a chance to attack?

Sharknado Cover

And let’s talk about actually throwing a homemade bomb into a tornado. You know that is stupid and it won’t work in real life. Is this movie encouraging the next generation of Darwin award winners? In real life, the sun will not come out after you throw a bomb inside a tornado. You could see the sun, when you are being judged by God up in Heaven. You also don’t see hundreds of sharks coming together to attack humans in real life. Obviously, SyFy wanted to make this movie as horrible and crazy as possible, they succeeded at that!

During many of the scenes, you kept on seeing people running away from the water and the sharks. You would think the people would have gotten far away from the beach and the water when the sharks started to attack. And not running around for 10 minutes like there was nothing going on. And yes, let’s blame this on global warming, there has to be a reason for this disaster. Other blame went towards the government as well. Yeah, the government does not control the weather. And how does the Hollywood sign come apart that easily?

The movie also had many bad scenes. Tell me, during a disaster, you would not see pretty sunny skies and normal traffic and city scenes sandwiched in between scenes where people are being eaten alive by sharks. You just would not see that during a well made movie. And during the last 15 minutes of the movie, how could the helicopter survive being that close to a tornado? And at the nursing home, why were the people outside when there was tornadoes swirling around? And how can you use a chainsaw to cut a shark in half and to get out of a shark? I don’t think that is even possible in real life.

For an average budget of $1.5 million dollars, you get your average science-fiction-monster-attack formula that attracts people with low IQ’s and self-esteem. Although the buzz was massive on social media, the ratings were not so great with averages of around 1.4 million viewers. Yes, I think you will get quite a few laughs while watching Sharknado. But this movie is something I would not expect winning an Oscar. But hey, there’s the Razzies!