The New Triple Long Pig Dare Ya: SHARKNADO 3, CHOPPING MALL

I was shocked watching SHARKNADO 3, which premiered with much Shark Week-esque hooplah on Syfy last week, when one of the "live tweets" mentioned "the theme park worker" and not the Universal Orlando Theme Park worker, which is really doing your promotional tie-in guy wrong. Meanwhile a commercial commemorates one of the recently eaten Secret Service guys, saluting him for being free at last from his wearisome cellular contract. Hey, that's clever, taking a chummy cue from Shark Week's many tie-ins over on Discovery. Aye, a fine example of synergy and vertical integration, albeit offset by the instantly-dated subtitle: "Oh hell no!" White people are now so crazy about that phrase. It's right up there with "let's do this" the white version of "lets do dis." Can using words like "clutch," and "baller" be far behind, yo? "Try the new, super- ill sausage and baller bacon butter triple hog dare ya from Applebees" Dave and Busters new Holla Back Baller Rack: 15 ribs for fifteen bucks" or "Patron Blue Tequila - Clutch... simply clutch."

The Sharknado series is the biggest hit yet to come from the latest Corman offshoot company joint Asylum. The producers realized they had a great high concept idea and so decided to spend a little more money and do it better than the usual wretchedness. Thus, SHARKNADO the First delivered the same sort of kitschy but solid thrill vehicle Corman had been parking on drive-in and TV screens across the country all through the 50s-70s and late night cable all through the 80s, and VHS rentals all through the 90s. And lately, for SyFy, he's been in the shadows behind a new self-aware camp golden age (if you don't take too much umbrage at crappy CGI). Usuing the 'nado as a springboard, Asylum has left their tackier jungle-based giant pythons and crocodile-octopus combos behind and gone for a slightly more upscale approach and garnered a great Twitter spike. The result, by the third one there's enough onboard for Synergy tie-ins to make Roger and Julie very happy.

Because hey, you can never have too many clever ad men tying in their lures on this big air shark wrangle, because every time there's a self-aware camp 'event' like this, the self-aware metatextually hip tie-ins become closer and closer to the actual movie until the two are tangled as two fishing lines. The result makes for quite a spectacle, as watching America eat itself always is, even as it eats you from the toes up, until all that's left is a finger on the remote.

Such faux-self deprecating product placement and tie-in integration is all over the net, and even on NBC's Saturday Night Live, which does Amex commercials in the same manner as their satiric commercial sketches, making the two impossible to separate. In other words, vertical integration is no mere Jack Donaughey 30 ROCK joke. Check out this Clickhole ad's deadpan mix of satire and straight forward advertising... where does one end and the other begin? Exactly.

That's why the second SHARKNADO was so painful: it had become fully self-aware and was just camping it up, shitshow-style, featuring a string of bloated once-familiar faces hoping to up their Twitter numbers before they're eaten or crushed by the severed head of the Statue of Liberty; and Fin's hero complex looking dangerously close to domestic terrorism (See Micro-Manager Munchausen) eagerly buying the ingredients to plastic explosives from various deli workers. They forgot it wasn't just the tornado that was interesting, but the incoming tidal surge that flooded the drainage sewers and left the water line climbing up into the Hollywood Hills. The way it all unfolded over one long afternoon--starting in a Santa Monica beachfront bar and ending high above some strange air field next to a UVA rest home--and rode one long incoming wave, and the way it was all seen from behind wet SUV windows, and heard in the background FM radio news updates folded into the slap of the wipers as they crawled through the soggy traffic. There was the stabbing sharks with your pool cue as they come rolling in through the bar window; the green table felt soaked in blood and saltwater; the traffic inland, stalled out on shoulders getting dumped on from upper exit ramps; the sharks in swimming pools; the sharks sliding down the highway strips; cars waiting for wave intervals to dash past off-ramp intersections; the way normal life seemed to go on simultaneously to the disasters --traffic is normal right outside on the highway--it all was analogous to the film's effect. It was exciting without trying to earn our respect, or to suspend our disbelief and sweep us into a magical realm. It was enough for SHARKNADO that we laughed once in awhile, and didn't reach for the remote.

Print the legend though - the Sharknado itself caught on, so did Ian Zetterling and Tara Reid. No one but me seems to remember the coolest parts: Nova with her crush and courage and USS Indianapolis-style backstory; the flooding aspect, the boozy bar-to-rainy car sense of afternoon drunk melancholy friendly belonging.

But time marches on, and the flood was probably harder to animate digitally than just having airborne sharks. And this tie-in bonanza is once-in-a-lifetime. I'm sure none of the subsequent airings will have those same ads, and it's a damn shame. 

But hey, Bo Derek plays Tara Reid's mom; and she's eternal like "She Who Must Be Obeyed", both of them dragging now-designated sharknado expert Fin to Orlando (for theme park tie-ins) instead of into the thick of the tornado, or helping the president prepare for the oncoming tide of inexplicable airborne sharks (the White House is destroyed; the mood is jovial). Reid's quite pregnant, their oldest son has "deployed" so isn't around; their cute daughter Claudia (Aubrey Peebles) is played by a different actress with dark hair (Ryan Newman), a subject of much small talk on Twitter. Now Fin and his family are public figures, America's designated sharknado chasers, with an Oval Office quick pass. Ever the hog of the first film's glory, Fin doesn't like that Cassie Scerbo's Nova spent the sequel off on her own (though I could swear I spotted her in the subway), going all storm chaser Mad Maxine without him, ensconced in an armored shark investigation camper with radar, arsenal, and contingency plan (Frankie Muniz is her lovelorn tech guy). Once again, Scerbo steals the show and bumps this back up to the old levels, giving her usual great raspy voice Jersey girl menthol-smoker realness, even to her manic obsessive psychospeak. When she says, for example, that when she crawled out of the shark in the climax of the first film: "it's never been the same," she does it with just enough gravitas to be neither turgid nor campy. It's just a junky-ass flick, but in this moment it shows you can address PTSD without being either dismissive or PSA maudlin. 

Cassie Scerbo, you are the heart and soul of these films and never let them tell you different! Tara Reid gets the name recognition but you provide the soul. Scerbo, your misguided love for Fin--who only has eyes for his family which of course makes you love him more--is the first film's true core. Not having you around in the second made it fairly trite going. Is there anything more unseemly than some Cali broheim lecturing us on what it means to be New Yorkers as he runs hither and yon, chasing his family around the all the usual sights (Times Square! Subway! Mets Stadium! Statue of Liberty! O00h-rah!) like a confused maniac terrorist-tourist hybrid? 

I don't even mind that Fin's still got the obsessive hero complex this 3rd time, because it fits the film's subtextual army recruitment propaganda and NRA promotion. Whenever gun nuts take the law into their own hands to save their neighborhoods from flying sharks, this movie proclaims, we all benefit. Michelle Bachman and Ann Coulter-- both of whom make cameos--especially benefit from this red state synergy. And of course NASCAR and military build-up must be acknowledged, and respected. Ooh-rah! UFC fighter Josh Barnett blasts sharks for the military--now more than ever. In the synergy ads, cosmetics come in real killer colors; and there's the usual incessant car insurance barrage "I guess they don't like you driving around on three wheels;" there's the smug girl chiding her husband with her good driving record cashback; Sam Jackson ranting about your 'hard-earned' cashback; the new Jeep Cherokee; the M. Night movie about creepy grandparents; Pepsi; for us in NYC a spate of local ads for: the Honda Summer Clearance Event, Broadway superstars of Magic "The Illusionists," and The Book of Mormon. Promos for Syfy's own latest 'scary critter+natural disaster' hybrid hop-on, "Lavalantula"; the upcoming Syfy miniseries Childhood's End which is about an alien invasion that brings happiness and peace but what's the downside? What are these peacenik aliens really up to? "I would rather the world go down in flames under our control," a staunch white male shouts "than live in prosperity and peace under theirs!" Spoken like a true Republican! "Messing with Sasquatch" promotes rude near-bullying taunts of Bigfoot in the name of jerky; turkey and guacamole (flavored substance) from Subway; Captain Obvious at Hotels.com ("They won't judge your life choices"); some guy with an unbearably pandering sensitive voiceover, the kind so common now, where they talk to you like you're five years-old and just skinned your knee:"All you need to see is the next 200 feel - that's how life unfolds - and you'll get there." (1) Fuck that. The badass anti-smoking ad equates a cigarette with a vicious science class monster, and that's so clutch. Anything that kills you makes you cool first. If Bogie's life taught as anything it's that real men don't do longevity.  

Subtextual pro-NRA ultra neoconservative Army recruitment tool or no, watching Tara Reid give birth while falling through Earth's atmosphere inside a giant flaming shark, Fin cutting a whole so the parachutes can get through, it's tough to stay mad at America. Reid's skin looks much better, by the way, than in previous episodes (did she read my dermatological recommendations?). And it's great to see Nova again, especially all militarized like that. I just hope the Syfy/Asylum brain trust wise up and give Nova her own local girl vs. shark series. She's that old animal flesh creeping back again, a thumb in the eye of the CGI Moreau! Second Amendment 4-Eva!

CHOPPING MALL (1986) on the other hand, came to me free of all commercials, liens and tie-ins. Seeing it (for the first time) last week after the NAD 3 was very satisfying. Why had I waited almost 30 years to get onboard the MALL train? The poster alone (at left) kept me away back in 1986, when I was still a young punk smoking his way through college. It looked like a cheap slasher film which by 1986 was one desiccated formula. I remember imagining some bloated, mentally challenged mall cashier chopping up and eating the long pig (you have to look close to see the hand holding bag is mechanical). 

Turns out, my imagination was wrong! I found out last week that it's a Corman-produced joint about mall security robots run amok after their control tower is struck freak lightning, the same night three young furniture store clerks and their dates, plus another couple, spend the night at the mall furniture store to (censored!). It's Corman underling Jim Wynorski's directorial debut and he'd go on to much worse things, I'd imagine (I'm too leary of adenoidal snarkiness, fat guy gross eating, frizzed out 80s hair and fake breasts to travel very far in his and fellow leerer Fred Olen-Ray's overall direction). But here, some initial snark and gross guy's eating aside (you can just skip that scene and be none the worse for wear), the all-in-a-single-night momentum keeps things pleasant and there are nice tracking shots, a good percolating synth score and genre in-jokes enough to make Joe Dante smile wanly at Forrest Ackerman's autograph. For example, the gun store in the mall is called "Peckinpah's"; the nerd shows his blind date ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS while everyone else gets it on (the kind of thing I used to do, alas, on dates - I'd even show them the same movie! Hmmm It's so painful to remember!); there are dialogue quotes from the original THING ("it's gonna be real mad when it gets to me") in a way that lets us know these two buddies have seen that film as man times as I have; one character tries to dispel robot attention by saying "Klaatu Barada Nikto and the robot lasers borrow sound effects form the 1954 WAR OF THE WORLDS. Corman company movie posters adorn the pizza shop walls; Mary Woronov and Paul Blartel roll their eyes during the robot debut ceremony (with plenty of ROBOCOP allusions); Corman regular Dick Miller is a cranky custodian. Sure, the acting veers all over the place, especially the half-hearted screams of the usually great Crampton (she just looks great this time), but that just adds to the ramshackle verite... Teenagers, man, who the hell knows how they'd handle being, as one character says, by way of apology for her skittishness, "chased around a mall in the middle of the night by killer robots?"  

As with all Corman and Co's output, there's the realization no one wants to see 'real' acting, so we can eschew the seven stages of grief which pretentious writers and actors so often mistake for realism or importance (that so deaden THE MIST, for example), and go right to the savagery switchpoint. Even the designated strapping jock type Mike (the beloved John Terlesky of DEATHSTALKER 2) has good-natured charisma rather than Cruisian narcissism; the nerdy blind date's a crack shot (Kelli Maroney, who was in the excellent NIGHT OF THE COMET--which I did see in the theater); and the sexy older girl (Karrie Emerson) is an ace mechanic. Rather than sobbing and whining, the girls make bombs with cans of gas and protect each other's flanks. Sultry Crampton does a half-assed job but doesn't last long enough to be a bother and adds natural sex appeal. The robots are real-size, genuinely remote-controlled full scale maniacs on real tank treads, whizzing up and down the real mall halls (they filmed after-hours like Romero with DAWN). The robots are GOG-esque, with Gort laser eyes, and Robocop-style platitudes--a combination way cooler than you'd expect for such a low budge endeavor with such an ROTM poster.

To tie in SHARKNADO, Wynorski's currently working on something called SHARKANSAS WOMEN'S PRISON MASSACRE.  Dominique Swain and Traci Lords will star. I will certainly watch it... probably not. Wynorski is very hit and miss for me, mostly miss. But I do like DEATHSTALKER 2, and CHOPPING MALL, as it doesn't just source from TERMINATOR but from TERMINATOR's own sources, and it achieves the rarest of all hat tricks in this genre: self-aware intertextual wit that never descends into campy disdain for its own genre. After all, it was Roger Corman's 50s sci-fi films that inspired THE TERMINATOR (James Cameron even got his start working for Corman) which led to CHOPPING MALL, which weaves that thread to a separate strand of suburban amok consumerist satire for a weave that's pure New World schlock.

Just as the recent masterpiece IT FOLLOWS did, CHOPPING MALL knows that great horror begins at home, not in some idyllic small town or some decayed inner city but in the real normal middle class suburbs, the mall, and home by our theater-killing TV sets. Anywhere we go to feel safe, or sated, or comforted is-- in the perfect horror film-- used against us. America has always been and will always be slightly paranoid. It's only natural that any oases we create to escape from danger would itself one day try to kill us. 

It's a chip off the old block that way. 

Aside from swatting a fly or two we need never kill things anymore, in real life: we seldom even kill our own food. But our animal DNA has us nonetheless hardwired for hardship --it releases that special dopamine reward only on special occasions that mark our---and therefore its--continued triumph over adversity. When we kill our own meat through some savage effort, or start and maintain a camp fire, or vanquish our foes in physical combat, it gives us the exultation dopa jackpot. Without those kind of basic challenges, those dopamine chemicals gradually tone way down. When a good movie taps those instincts, we get a little taste, but as for real life dopamine-flood primal caveman victories, what's left? 

Sex, procreation, maybe kickboxing-- all mere scraps compared to the staggering endorphin rush we'd once get after killing a saber-toothed tiger with nothing but a sharpened rock while weak from near starvation, then cooking and eating it with the tribe...

Goofy but sufficiently deadpan horror movies like CHOPPING MALL and SHARKNADO tap into this exhilaration even as they expose its utter ridiculousness. They clarify the answer to why we create our own artificial calamities, the endless disaster movies and evil adversaries, and why advertisers take advantage of this need for endorphin stimuli, which is why the shark eating you will soon be financially obligated to remind you about the new Applebee's shrimp platter (it comes with an all you-can-eat salad buffet!) Don't ask why this great white eating machine is so eager for you to clean your insides out with good ruffage, you may learn things about your current nutritional value that you're better off ignoring. Isn't it fortunate Syfy offers the perfect distraction?



NOTES:
1. My voiceover career stalled out when clients stopped wanting the deep Tom Waits rasp and moving towards that touchy feely "high" voiced food co-op nonsmoking smug sensitivity in my voice so I may be prejudiced, but fuck that namby-pamby shit. Love.... it's what makes a Suburu a Suburu,... fuck that guy. When a Corona gets its lime, you can kiss my white ex-smoker asszzz. 
2. I literally watched that movie last week, and at his age had the same shy boy trouble busting first moves. I'd show them weird old movies til they'd either get tired and leave or throw themselves at me. But that was before... the meds. Now I'm all cured. Too late though - the Cialis giveth and the SSRIs take away

Micro-Manager Munchausen: THE STRAIN, SHARKNADO 2, and a little bit THE LEGO MOVIE

Heroes used to dread their appointed hour. They'd dart around town begging help from civilians instead of saddling the heroic measure. They'd turn away from the call, citing 'reasons' like poor marksmanship or their Quaker faith, or Ingrid Bergman sticking them for the cost of a train ticket back in Paris, or all the droids or cows needing repair back on Uncle Ned's farm. But now, in today's crowded sci fi/horror climate, well, just try and stop him from rescuing you, no matter how safe you are, or how much you'd prefer to wait for a qualified professional. Cops, parents, ex-wives, children, all regard our new brand of hero as a Munchausen Chicken Little, especially since he's nearly always a deadbeat dad with a history of micro-management heroism that's already cost him his wife, house and perhaps even joint-custody because, even if he just passes a crying kid or distraught mom on the street on the way to divorce court (proximal morality), he has to force his help upon them instead. These new crazy 'heroes' run around like William Shatner with gremlins on the plane, grabbing lapels of bewildered pedestrians, blocking ambulances, yelling "Don't you get it?!" at overstretched EMTs. They've only ever been the villain in two movies: STRAW DOGS and THE LEGO MOVIE. And in one most people presume he's the hero since he's played by Dustin Hoffman, and in the other he eventually lightens up. But in two major TV events this summer--THE STRAIN (the new FX show from the mind of acclaimed sci fi horror maestro Guillermo del Toro) and SHARKNADO 2: THE SECOND ONE (the Syfy original sequel that's far inferior compared to the original [see here])--these micro-managing ex-husbands are just obnoxious. Even as the world ends or CGI sharks fly through the air, they run around with humorless unshaven urgency, saving everyone in sight, whether they like it or not.

THE STRAIN begins with the story of NYC health officer Dr. Ephraim Goodweather (the usually bald Corey Stoll) refusing to listen to his superiors when a plague-infested plane lands at JFK. Most passengers are dead. Four survivors are anxious to get home and start spreading the 'news' and he wants to contain them in a makeshift hazmat lab. Meanwhile a savvy old Jewish pawnbroker tries to advise him on what's going on, but Goodweather has the man arrested for having a sword in an airport terminal. Almost immediately, our urge to see the world wiped out just to spite this twit is insurmountable.

It doesn't help that the bad guys (led by Thomas Eichorst, left) are far cooler: they honor their deals, pay in cash, do their research, invest heavily in make-up and black market organs; their urge to see the world end is indicative less of greed and more of simply of being turned on by chaos. Hell, I say let these long-tongued vamp zombies have a crack at planet custodianship --they couldn't possibly leave it worse off than they found it.

Goodweather disagrees, or rather hasn't thought that far ahead, being obligated by his little taste of power as a CDC agent to grab those passing lapels. He's so self-righteous and negligent that he even ignores the edicts of his superiors and winds up under arrest, yet still invites himself to tromp all over the rights of others as he attempts to be on time just once to his hearing over joint custody for his 'yawn' little son. There's a word for this type of guy, Munchausen by-proxy, or rather, as I call them, 'dad of great adventure'. They can't admit their insecurity and ambivalence about their roles as second class citizen in the modern family unit, and so refuse to either leave the family unit or stay with their wife; they can neither stand to be with or to abandon their kid, and are more determined with each passing missed court date to convince mom and child that he wants to be with them more than anything but you know, um.... he has to force himself on a world that doesn't want saving, or at least it doesn't want to be saved by him, and who can blame it? So wait right here, judge, somewhere a child is crying.

Naked white/grey monsters are always played by limber, sinuous dancers. 

Anyway, we know from the start that Goodweather's showing good sense in trying to quarantine these survivors but at the same time, we would hate to be unable to get home after a lengthy cross-Atlantic flight, forced to wait in a sterilized plastic cube for weeks while he tinkers with our blood samples and stammers excuses to the court stenographer. Plus, why would we root for Goodweather to stop the spread of a plague when that's going to be the whole show? I love a lot of del Toro's art design and I admire his willingness to kill children, but I've always winced when he goes too far with his saintly Catholic family mi madre es mi vida bullshit and the whole business with the giant worm tongue leaping out of the monster's faces is too familiar, thanks to his already using it in MIMIC and BLADE II that even Paul W.S. Anderson it used it in RESIDENT EVIL. We've seen it, bra.

Meanwhile there's this idiot woman whose husband is infected and he's barking at her to run away while she can; their dog's blood is dripping from his mouth and she just stands there like a moron, frozen in 'terror', well within striking range of his forked tongue. He's telling her to run, and we're screaming at the screen for her to run, and she just stands there, until we wonder how she ever lived past the second episode. But the next scene she's burying the dog and after the neighbor complains because he still hears growling she pushes him into the shed to feed her now-chained husband so we're back into thinking she's awesome. It's that kind of show, and typical of del Toro, for every corny Mexican soap moment there's two kickass touches, or vice versa.

Last year, The Asylum (the offshoot of Concord which was the 80s version of New World which was the 70s version of AIP) gave us the surprise meme hit SHARKNADO (see: Wronger than the Storm). Now we got the the sequel, bound for much tweeting, and therefore of great interest to fading actors in need of being seen by the young 'constant-texter' generation. Aye, matey, to trod bravely before the green screen curtain and be eaten in style, knowing for sure your every flubbed line will earn a hundred winky tweets...

But there's the rub, for in intentionally courting camp, what crap may come?

Chickens Little of the Sea

We start off right in the thick of it as Fin (Ian Zering) and his re-united family (ex-wife Tara Reid and his son and daughter) get stalked by sharks on a plane. Fin, ever the hero, gets the plane down safely, but no one bothered to tell him that NYC is blessed with a stalwart network of first responders, and anyone who mentions needing to build a bomb to a deli owner in Times Square should be turned into Homeland Security, not helped in his mission. Unlike most sensible people, Fin doesn't find shelter, or take an Ambien and go to sleep 'til it's all over; he runs around trying to find the other members of his traveling party and components for his homemade bomb, which he plans to throw into the wind to save us all. Dude, this ain't California, you can't just drive anywhere throwing bombs around. And what's more, traffic is at a standstill anyway, add a flood and a tornado and....

As Dennis Weaver put it in Touch of Evil: it's a mess. It's a stinkin' mess.

I know our cops have problems with quick response in certain neighborhoods but not, my friends, in midtown, so their lack of presence as Fin amoks around Broadway is suspicious. No one is attacked unless seen first by Fin as he races past, clocking them for B-list celeb status (included in his posse, slightly used versions of: Vivica Fox, Kelly Osbourne, Judd Hirsch, Judah Friedlander, Biz Markie, Downtown Julie Brown, Billy Rae Cyrus, Rachel True, Andy Dick, Mark McGrath) at which time they're either devoured by a passing shark or rescued by his quick thinking and thus obligated to join the panicky parade running down his errant brood as they run around trying to find him. Matt Lauer, Kelly Ripa, and Al Roker look on from the TV screen, rolling with the sharknado concept as a fact barely worth an eyebrow raise (just avoid making seal-like movements).

Fin's hero complex was perfect for LA in the original because it made sense.  He had to protect the valuable clientele of his beachfront bar, and it's at a beachfront bar just like it, we can imagine, that the notion of a sharknado first developed. Who amongst us hasn't drunk deep from a sandy beer after a long day body surfing and imagined how badass it would be if sharks came through the window and started chasing people around the pool table, or swam in the air, or that the rec room floor was water so you had to jump from couch to couch? All these things and more, SHARKNADO had.

That Fin was an ex-lifeguard gave him an excuse for his chronic rescuing out west. His idiot desire to rescue his family before they're in danger was offset with a Hawksian sense of real time and tidal surge momentum. We followed the incoming flood from Fin's bar on the beachfront to the boardwalk, the parking lot, downtown, and inland and up into the Hills. A tangible rainy vibe was to be found in their impromptu getaway car; the windshield wipers and radio traffic delays meshed perfectly with the conversation on where to go from there, creating a vibe familiar to anyone who's ever left a drunken party with a new maskeshift tribe piling into the car to head off to a second location.  We had John Heard as the comic relief, bashing sharks with his barstool; barmaid Nova (Cassandra Scerbo - above left), the stealth warrior, brandishing a shark scar (with its own Quint backstory) and a shotgun; wingman Jason Simmons helped with the heavy lifting; Finn doing the driving and moral high ground posturing. Together they raced with the inward tide as it filled the streets and stalled highway traffic with sharks and flotsam, leading to exit ramp winch rescues, and various members of his party being eaten, such as his daughter's douche bag boyfriend as the shark water filled his ex-wife's living room but left the driveways merely damp as if from a distant rain machine.

And as Fin's UV-damaged ex-wife, Tara Reid was perfectly cast. Embittered, hungover but still with some vague torch for old Fin, she veered the Hawksian dynamic towards a weird comedy of remarriage, with Nova as the Marilyn Monroe and Reid as the Ginger Rogers (in Hawks' MONKEY BUSINESS).

In short, SHARKNADO had a lot of things going for it the sequel lacks. As a Corman-affiliated film it conjured up the good old days of movies like ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS; it turned its budgetary limits into an asset, which SHARKNADO 2's NYC location simply will not permit. Gone is Nova, the badass barmaid with the sexy scar, so there's no interesting sexual dynamic (that Fin's too noble to sleep with her provided the previous film's emotional core in ways lacking with his old flame here), and there's no bar, no tide rushing in-- the way the tidal surge in the original. The first film had a flood first, then the tornado, so it made more sense -- there was a build-up --from the ocean sharks to the beach sharks to the flooded rain gutter sharks and so on. Here sharks start hitting up in the cruising altitude of a 747 and just get less credible from there. New York is too real a place, too concrete, there's no time for grandstanding or defying gravity (vs. fantasy unreal LA); when Fin drops into the city to find his family, he's indignant at having to wait in traffic --surely there's something Jud Hirsch as his cabbie can do! This is important! He has to run to Queens to rescue his family from the baseball game.

If you're a NYC resident, his grandstanding is painful. Without the setting of surreal LA enhancing the CGI phoniness, this sequel is less like a surprise so-bad-it's-great entry amid a deluge of crappy CGI monster/bad weather hybrids and more a 'too aware everyone is tweeting about me to not make duckfaces' shitshow --as prefab and empty as a string of commercials for Shark Week during a Jay and Silent Bob film edited for content and watched on TNT by a mid-life crisis-having unemployed divorcee pothead after coming home, buzzed and alone, from lunch at the Wal-Mart parking lot Hooters... again. 

Oh well, we still have the original, and the great untold shark story present in Tara Reid's weary face. As the wife who steps back into the eye of the Munchausen storm, booting the far more interesting Nova out of the sequel, she leaves not a single extraneous breath of sexy air. While Fin runs around building bombs and leaving suspicious packages on subway platforms, it's Reid who provides the real scary story here. You can read it in her skin, an epidermal horror story, in slow mummifying motion, about how a hundred young and glowing B-list actors went into the sun twenty years ago and came out looking like bad taxidermy. Botox and collagen took the rest.

Anyway, they delivered the bomb.

Wronger than the Storm: SHARKNADO, THE REEF

If November persists, talk to do your doctor.

If the 12 month cycle was Dr. Moreau's island, November would be the House of Pain: "there's no twilight in the tropics," Moreau says, "darkness falls like a curtain." So does night in November. The hushed chill of dying leaves rustle around in the corners of streets like packs of shuffling Bed-Stuy crackheads during the walk home from work at five PM! You absorb their shoulder-ache withdrawal and the cold of their torn feet from the corner of your glazed thousand yard stare as you sweep past, muttering incessant vile oaths (you, not them). November: the New York marathon ends on a cold Sunday evening after Halloween is over --and thus all that is good in fall. You obligingly weave your way to the finish line to meet them, your wobbly friends in their reflecting mylar disposable ponchos shining against the foggy grey afternoon; your pride in them is a little flicker of warmth in your freezing jitters. Going out to a bar to celebrate, sitting at a long table of celebrants with pitchers of beer and drams of Wild Turkey, none of which you can have as you're on the wagon, but you know that one shot--one single gulp-- and all that ache and misery would melt into an amber glow, all the pain converted to heaven in the time it take your leviathan blood to swim an arterial league. But No... No No November. Daylight savings begins like a long slow wet dog shudder; now it gets dark before you have a chance to emotionally prepare, the curtain that falls in Moreau's tropics. Suddenly the couch is extra cozy and every fibre of your being says "Let's not go out tonight. Or this weekend. Or ever." The sight of those shivery runners, high with endorphins (and later whiskey) they're the last you see of your crew. But with each missed party, another nail in the social coffin. But are you trembling? No. Why?

SHARKNADO.

Apparently it was all the rage in "Twitterverse" but I saw it later, or 'just now' on Netflix. After work. Alone. I'm not going to pretend I was in on its "trending." But I will confess I needed it. Didn't want no boring bits or glum nonsense the night I first saw it, just now, under lots of Brooklyn stress and soggy socked sinking from the weight of atmospheric conditions. There was none, and soon I was feeling warm and dry while watching Los Angeles get flooded with CGI sharks, in what plays out like almost like real time, snapping-up spoiled Beverly Hills brats and swimming along the freeway or raining from the sky with a rare-for-Syfy propulsive inland-rushing tidal energy. Rather than blithe news cutaways there's long car rides with fellow drunks, looking out from behind rainy windows as confused news reports crackle on the FM radio. Life goes on; even as LA falls apart under the rain of sharks, assholes still bicker and hardcore surfer exes overreact and have to save every endangered chum.

November. The bitterest, crushingest month demands a city (not mine) fall in totem if its to spare us its crushing measure. We watch LA drown in sharks the way barleycorn huskers watch their effigies burn, before family obligations rise like a prematurely buried Usher to wrest even the highest of kites back down to the beige carpets of a vacuumed earth, at least that kite will fly, and the husk will burn. The darkness will creep up towards the end of lunch and by the walk home we'll be snared in the trawling net of cold autumnal night. Relationships will crumble, jobs melt away, the windows shutter, the air conditioner will be taken hurriedly from the window... like a reverse burglar. But first, the fire.

The point is, SHARKNADO comes along, and a Ferris wheel rolls into the side of a four story international style apartment building like it's no big deal. Charlton Heston might drag that Ferris wheel roll out to three hours, but this film rushes along past it. Sharks in the bar, sharks in the traffic jam; "It's like old faithful!" as water shoots up from the sewers. "We're gonna need faith to get through that" over a flooded dip under an overpass. A douchebag boyfriend of the sulky daughter says: "Even if it is the storm of the century, Beverly Hill's rescue services are second to none!" And then he looks out the window, sees a shark in the swimming pool and before he can react a wave crashes through into the living room and his head gets bit off. And there was much rejoicing. If you ever played the game as kids where you had to be halfway up the stairs or on a chair or couch to avoid getting eaten by a carpet shark then yes you are in bad movie heaven. If the leader of the survivors, Finn, is a typical bleeding heart idiot who has to stop to help everyone, even school buses that look empty. "This is your problem, Finn!" bemoans the weary ex-wife (Tara Reid) - and we kind of agree, but then Boom! Turns out --there's scared kids in there, and a TJ Miller-ish bus driver way out of his depth! You saved another busload from the shahks, Finn!

What a man that Finn, what a tool. The real rooting interest is in his barmaid Nova (Cassie Scerbo) who wants to be more than a maid to Finn, but he's not into it (What a mensch Finn is! He has to stay loyal to an ex-wife who's already got a mule of a boyfriend literally kicking in his stall). As the loyal hardscrabble Nova, Scerbo proves the most interesting and non-cliche'd character. And she's also the source of larger-than-life wit and humor; a combination Brody, Quint and Indiana Jones, in the Goldilocks Zone of mild hotness (i.e. down to earth and accessible), toting a shotgun, and actually pulling off the kind of lame in-joke lines ("Sharks.... why did it have to be sharks?") that would make lesser actors crumple up in defeat. Later she even has her own 'Quint on the USS Indianapolis' style monologue as to how she got that sexy thigh scar. There's also John Heard as a dissolute bar regular, using his stool as a shark bashing device, and others that come and go and are gone in a flash of dark CGI blood spatter.

Effects are serviceable without worrying too much about perfection. Sharks fly in the wind but there are no other fish nor even a shred of seaweed in the wind, not even a wood splinter, and best of all, this apocalypse of sharkiness seems to follow Fin and friends alone -- other cars continue to drive by, unaware of any problems, even ignorant that the Hollywood sign is down to " Hol  o d". And even the biggest disaster of all: cell phone reception is gone is handled. Would it be half as funny anywhere else than LA? Car rental agencies are still in business, cops are cordoning off areas of downtown for no particular reason. There's no cause to panic unless you've been attacked, but meanwhile half a block down they're still waiting in line at the liquor store. Priorities.

There's been a ton of similar junky films from the SyFy-Asylum complex: Corman Y-generation ripoffs of Italian ripoffs of JAWS' rip-offs, which in turn reach back through cocktopus tentacles into the era of the 50s bug movie (ripping off Corman's originals). Most of them are pretty weak, effects wise, acting wise, script wise. But this one, it's different. It's like it overheard every excited kid hanging out on the beach in 1974-78, every kid wistfully imagining sharks flying out of the sky. 'NADO took notes like these kids were holy prophets. And let Tara Reid stand as a lesson against growing up under too much sun and peroxide. Yea.

In the end, it's Scerbo's Nova who really stands out, who makes it work as more than a high concept stunt. With her Jersey girl hair and raspy voice, way with a gun, and foolish crush on the one guy too self-righteous to get with her, she's a unique new creature in these sorts of movies, and may SyFy remember to keep her in the sequels; and remember too the uniquely comforting sound of a car radio giving out updates low amidst the conversation about what LA shortcut to take and who to rescue first. And remember too that--unlike the Dads of Great Adventure movies--this one is more wryly critical of unwelcome meddler Finn's bad habit of problem of having rescue everyone he meets, all the time, whether they want his help or not. The critique, Nova, and the gentle flap of wipers, sound of rain and the roof, and shotguns being reloaded --these are what makes this film so good. I worry those very things won't survive in the sequels to come, in favor of crazy cameos, wacky synergized marketing tie-ins, product placement, stoner dumbness, has-beens the producer owes a favor to crowding onto the Fin-boat, and all the other stuff sequels accrue like barnacles when something this low on the totem pole hits viral on Twitter. And there will be sequels. They already have the sharks in the disc drive, after all, just waiting to be used again.

Unlike real monsters--or people, or seasons--they don't go bad.

It's not just that these barometric eating machine projections have hit such a comforting firelight-style chord, it's that all these decades later and we're still happy to be reminded we were once afraid of the water. We can project our darkest unconscious fears right into the murky dark, right there as we lounge around under the beach sun. We all know the hard truth, even kids: the ocean takes it all. Soaks it all up it does, like a combination stress pillow and life jacket around your albatross neck, to make room for all the misery November has to offer.

Netlfix told me to watch THE REEF next, so I did, anxious to stay in the zone. Well, of course it's not as fun. Maybe it's something in their accents and cheery disposition but it's hard to distance oneself from a single Aussie in distress as easily the entire city of Los Angeles. The clear blue water under blazing sun is divine, but the money shots in THE REEF all occur under the surface. The story of a jaunty weekend boating expedition to some reasonably far away Aussie island in the a clear blue inlet (?) that ends up sinking and leaving the boaters dog-paddling around trying to make it to the island in one piece, it's not even the attacks themselves that rivet or make the gut sink, but the sight of great whites slowly materializing out of the crystal blue blankness around our frightened water-treading castaways. Like a distant rider in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, they circle and you can't tell if they see you or not, their dead eyes betray no sudden interest. They just orbit lazily, then Bam!

But there's only so many times you can do that and have the same groovy effect. After awhile all you have is a lot of anxiety and monotony commingle even if you're glad to be relatively dry. There's so much damned blue between the sky and the sea, you pray for red just to liven up the palette.

The other problem is the sheer stupidity of the outdoorsman captain. Why, if you're sailing in a really remote area with a bunch of people, wouldn't you have some kind of radio or distress signal? Or goddamned lifejackets! A goddamned flare gun. Anything!! Australia is crawling with sharks, so wouldn't you have something? Maybe shark repellent? Magnets? Life vests??!! Why if you are all in the water and completely vulnerable would you swim towards the friend of yours being eaten? What are you going to do to help, gather his falling limbs? You're just going to spread more blood in the water.

I doubt even SHARKNADO would argue that THE REEF (2010) is a better film, quality-wise. But aside from the stark blue scenery, it's a wee bit of a bummer, with wayyyyy too much acting. Do we see shark movies to get bummed out? No, we don't. (Though for me, I haven't even seen BLUE WATER for the same reason). SHARKNADO understands this. Actors need to be either confident enough to understand that too much screaming and hyperventilating in irrational panic can bum us out rather than make us scared, or be incompetent enough that it becomes fun to see them try to do either one. Here it's that they're good but not good enough to be bad enough that it's enjoyable.

The Aussies have a great advantage when it comes to monster movies: their country is lousy with great white sharks and giant crocodiles, and god knows what nameless evils lurk in the Outback, including all manner of Dundee-esque outdoorsy-worsy walla big knifed WOLF CREEK-ies, but they should never forget what we want out of a monster movie, laffs, mate! There's a baller Aussie croc film called ROGUE (2007) with the new queen of B-movie monsterdom, Rhada Mitchell, for example, that works a similar territory to REEF and is better for being so much hipper to our needs. And it's based on a true story, too. Take a note, November Netflix: THE REEF is just blue water and screaming, but SHARKNADO is deliverance from the cold dark depths and up into the sweet, sweet shallows. We can finally stand.