Sharknado (2013)

"A freak hurricane hits Los Angeles, causing man-eating sharks to be scooped up in tornadoes and flooding the city with shark-infested seawater."

Since I mentioned it in my last post, I suppose I ought to say something about "Sharknado". What better movie to review for "Surprise Sunday" especially as the biggest surprise is that I actually liked it?

Yes, I can find very little wrong with "Sharknado" other than the obviously awful effects and scientific impossibilities. It's very nicely paced, has some amusing gore, lots of action, and even a couple of decent moments of suspense. As far as disaster movies go, "Sharknado" is as exciting as any of the Summer blockbusters. In particular, there's a sequence with a Ferris wheel which is really outstanding considering the low-budget.

I didn't get bored, although I nearly did during the school bus rescue scene and a bit of superfluous family drama near the end, so I'm going to rate "Sharknado" as one of the best movies from The Asylum that I've ever seen. Take that with a huge pinch of salt though because I've only seen half a dozen of their products anyway. Clearly some talent was accidentally allowed to sneak in which I doubt will ever happen again. The Asylum have been trying for years to make an intentionally "so bad it's good" cult movie, but more through luck than judgement, they got the balance right this time.

Enough said!

Having got the praise out of the way, it's time to look at the more negative aspects.

"Sharknado" is, of course, a "B movie". Worse than that, it's more like a C, D, E or F movie, but it's certainly not "Z grade" like most of the theatrical films that I've reviewed recently. There's entertainment to be had here if you are in the right frame of mind, or even if you aren't. A lot of message board snobs have said that they'll only watch "Sharknado" with a load of beer on board, but there's no need for that unless you want to make a party out of it.

The acting is TV quality which is in keeping with this being a TV movie, but some of it is uncommonly bad. The biggest name in the film is John Heard, and he's beyond awful. Maybe it's his age or the fact that he just didn't care that much, but his performance is painfully embarrassing to watch.

Ian Ziering does a fairly decent job as the annoying lead character named Fin (geddit?) who doesn't realise the "no good deed goes unpunished" rule no matter how many times it slaps him in the face. That surprised me because I absolutely loathed him when he used to play Steve in "Beverly Hills 90210". What a difference almost a quarter of a century makes! Mind you, I only used to watch that show for Shannen Doherty so I barely registered Ian Ziering and didn't ever know his real name.

I still don't really know who Tara Reid is. I know she's in a couple of movies which I have on DVD ("The Big Lebowski" and "Urban Legend"), but I can't say that I recognised the name or was able to put a face to it even with that information. Apparently she plays Fin's equally irksome ex-wife, but if you'd told me that she was the daughter I wouldn't have been any wiser. Neither of them do much in this movie so Tara Reid's status in my mind isn't going to change.

You're going to need a bigger bookcase!

Cassie Scerbo, the pretty, shotgun-toting brunette with a slightly wonky nose, steals every scene she's in, so if anyone will be remembered from "Sharknado" in a 100% positive way, it'll be her. She alternates from cute to sexy in a heartbeat and may be someone to look out for in the future. It seems that she was in "Bring It On: In It to Win It" (2007), but I don't remember too much about that or if I ever watched it. She'd probably be great as a final girl in a real horror movie.

There's not much else to say about "Sharknado" as it's just a bit of fun. Apart from a couple of stunts, all the action was done with CGI and green screens, plus some models and a couple of latex mock-ups, so make of it what you will.

I think there was more talent shown with this computer generated silliness than in movies with a far bigger budget so I'll not-so-grudgingly give out praise where it's due. The stars of the show are the often incongruous effects, but getting the movie to look half as good as it does with the budgetary contraints and schedule must have taken some doing. Realistically, I can imagine that it was a lot less fun for everybody behind the scenes. Whoever did the post-production editing had such a great sense of timing that they also deserve some kind of award.

I have no hesitation in recommending "Sharknado" as the "must see" SyFy channel movie of 2013. Since I'm an "elitist prick" rather than a hipster, I'm definitely not saying that to be ironic. I couldn't care less if it makes me look like a hypocrite either. There's an exception to every rule and liking "Sharknado" serves me right for making rules for myself in the first place.

"Sharknado" isn't something that I'm ever going to buy on DVD (unless it's in a multipack), but it's certainly worth a rental once it comes to Redbox in September. I'm sure it'll be reshown ad nauseum before then though.

Nailbiter (2012)

"A mother and three daughters get caught up in a tornado and take shelter in a storm cellar. While trapped inside the cellar, they quickly discover that they are not alone."

Never mind how I saw "Nailbiter" since it isn't even out on DVD yet. If I was one of the privileged sycophants who praise everything just to get a free screener, I would have had whoever was responsible for this piece of crap falling over themselves to send me one. As it is, I'm just too honest, which is why, even though I've been doing this far longer than any other specifically horror movie reviewer on the internet, I'll never be a success compared to the big name websites. Mind you, it all depends on how you measure success because at least I will always be honest.

This terrible movie was absolutely one of the worst I've seen this year (or last year, or even the year before that). I'm still in total shock that anyone could make something this bad, not realise how bad it was (or even care), and hope to get a distribution deal for it.

What made it even more disappointing was that it wasn't all bad. It had quite good production values, started off well, the tornado effects were nice, the acting was mostly acceptable, and the mother of the three girls was kind of hot. She was certainly a lot better looking than her daughters anyway. I have no idea what her name was, but I'd guess from the IMDb cast list that she was played by Erin McGrane. If the IMDb have got it wrong (as there seems to be some confusion on there about this film) then I may have incorrectly named one of the ugly little girls in the film by accident. At this stage of the night, I don't even care.

With hardly any gore or action, "Nailbiter" was so shit that I'm going to give as many spoilers as I can just so you never have to watch it, and, hopefully, it never gets a DVD release. You know why? It's not that I mind anyone having a go at making a horror movie, but I've had enough of bad ones to last me a lifetime. This was the final straw.

The story was absolutely ridiculous with more plot contrivances than a 12-year-old would come up with for a school play. Basically, there was a mother and three daughters trapped in a basement during a tornado (and subsequent storm) who were too feeble between them to push open the basement doors, or use any of the numerous jars of inflammable moonshine to burn the doors open, and escape. There may have been some weird, mutant humanoids outside, but nothing a good hard kick in the goolies couldn't have sorted out. I know American horror movie characters are often pretty dumb, but this film was an insult to the intelligence of any viewer stupid enough to watch it. It didn't even have the decency to try to be a comedy!

The "storm creatures" (AKA werewolf ripoffs) were crappily done, made no sense (except that the storm was said to affect them all differently), and didn't appear on screen for more than a couple of minutes in total. The first one was apparently green in colour like a reptillian-zombie too just to give you an indication of how little thought went into this.

Honest to God, I thought I'd seen it all until the uglier of the two younger daughters got bitten on the arm (ON THE ARM!) and then, despite being full of energy before, fell into some kind of coma for over half the film! When the mother got scratched and collapsed in a similar way before eventually blowing herself up for no good reason, I was almost bald from pulling my hair out. Why did she do that? Couldn't she have thrown the jar of moonshine at the still which they'd moved under the basement doors and ran away quickly? It made no sense unless she was supposed to have died from having a couple of scratches on her belly.

I can barely even bring myself to talk about the eldest daughter's use of a nail-gun instead of a real weapon. They don't fire nails through the air, you know! You have to physically press them onto a board before the nail will come out. It's a little thing called a "safety mechanism" to stop dumb people from getting all Lone Rangery with the things and ending up in the emergency room.

I'm almost certain that the eldest daughter was played by Meg Saricks (pictured above with a real pistol), but I'm not 100% sure. She did okay with what she had to work with. Unfortunately, this was one of those films which was directed by nobody you've ever heard of, and starred even more people who you've never heard of and probably never will again.

It doesn't matter anyway because everybody died in this film even the cleverer of the ugly daughters. You could tell she was clever because she was wearing glasses and knew how to read! Oh, Christ-on-a-bike. She wasn't clever enough to recognise moonshine in a jar though. No, the mother just had to be a recovering alcoholic so that she could tell everyone what that was. Speccy-four-eyes was only in it to inform us of the background story to the creatures by finding a load of old newspapers full of headlines about storms, mutilations and weird numbers of babies being born because, clearly, somebody didn't know how to write exposition properly.

And, of course, it just had to end with a set-up for a potential sequel which promises to be even more lame. Oh great, next we can have the father of the girls being a military badass along with the big-nosed, nerdy boyfriend who must also have read the delayed text messages, as they wipe out the whole town of mutants. Or not, as the case may be.

How can anyone sane like or praise a movie like this? I know there's still a trendy, hipster movement which keeps hyping intentionally bad horror movies over any actual good ones, but the times are a-changing. Most people are sick of these amateur horror films now, and I'm proud to be part of the backlash.

It's Caturday! Some obscure finds

I know Caturday is nearly over, but we had a few problems with a tornado on Thursday. Most of the town was without power and, of course, the internet was down until only a few minutes ago.

Since I was one of the lucky ones who had electricity again within a few hours, I spent the last three days watching some pretty obscure (and not very good) horror movies.

On Thursday, I watched "The Haunting of Julia" (1977), "Milo" (1998), and "Bloody Birthday" (1981). I finally saw "The Dark Knight Rises" too which was horror for me anyway, but I'll write about that later. "Baturday" has been postponed due to wind.

On Friday, after helping some friends move fallen branches out of their yard, I watched a really dreadful Canadian anthology on VHS called "Mania" (also known as "Mania: The Intruder"). I think it was originally a made-for-TV movie from 1986 because I'd never heard of it before.

In the segment called "The Good Samaritan", Stephen Hunter (playing Dan Weston) exclaimed, "How did you get in here?" to the cat below. Obviously, it was because he got in through the same basement window that the knife-wielding maniac did! There was a twist to the story which I saw coming a mile away. It probably explains why the cat was eager to leave this film too.

Then I watched a quite a hard to find VHS title called "The Slayer" (1982). I have a feeling that it was actually banned during the "video nasties" nonsense in Britain, but Vipco re-released it on VHS with a few cuts. I have no idea if this is on DVD, but it's an awful movie and doesn't deserve to be.

At the end of "The Slayer", you find out that it was all a little girl's nightmare, it's Christmas and her father has bought her a big black cat for a present. There was no cat anywhere else in the movie so her terrified reaction to it made about as much sense as anything else. I'd avoid this one if I was you.

Earlier today, out of desperation, I started watching my "Drive-in Cult Classics" pack but I didn't get to any horror ones yet. To be honest, the first DVD seemed like '70s porn and I fell asleep to it. When I woke up, the internet was back on. Yay!

That's all I have time for right now. I wrote this in a bit of a rush, but I have dozens of sites to check, comments to read, and reviews to write of Christopher Nolan's "Batman" movies for tomorrow. With more storms predicted, that's assuming that the electricity and the internet stays on.


The Answers to Tuesday's Quiz
1. Monica Keena wears that big diver's watch in "Night of the Demons" (2009). She keeps checking it as she waits for dawn to come at 6am.
2. The cat is Hecate who belongs to Catwoman in "Batman: The Movie" (1966). I didn't say that it was from a horror movie.
3. Gnaghi is eating spaghetti (and quite a few other things) in "Cemetery Man" (1994). I even mentioned him by name in my review so that should have been easy.