Review: Sharknado 2: The Second One

Ian Ziering is back as the former surfer and Sharknado survivor who is travelling via plane with ex Tara Reid (who is kinda not his ex anymore), when he thinks he spots some sharks flying around in bad-looking weather outside the window. Indeed, it’s started all over again, and Reid somehow gets injured in all the calamity. She is hospitalised while Ziering travels to New York to try and get to his estranged sister (Kari Wuhrer!) and her family, who are about to attend a baseball game. A baseball game about to be cancelled by bad Sharknado weather. Judd Hirsch plays a New York cabbie, Mark McGrath plays Wuhrer’s husband who has a past with Ziering, Vivica A. Fox is their friend who has an even more interesting past with Ziering, with Judah Friedlander as another old buddy. Cameos include Robert Hays as the plane captain (Sadly not named Oveur), Sandy ‘Pepa’ Denton as one of Wuhrer’s gal pals, Billy Ray Cyrus as a surgeon (!), wrestler/Olympic gold medallist Kurt Angle as a fire chief (!), Robert Klein as the NY mayor (!!), and most ridiculously of all, Richard Kind as a former baseballer/former team manager (!!!!!!!). Various other news and media personalities turn up as themselves to show they’re hip to the whole “Sharknado” thing.

 

Director Anthony C. Ferrante (who used to work for “Fangoria” magazine) and screenwriter Thunder Levin are back with this 2014 attempt at creating the same social media/cultural phenomenon deal they kinda sorta did with 2013’s “Sharknado”. And hey, it proved to be one of my biggest pageview-earners, so I was game for a second go round. Unfortunately, they still haven’t learned that you can’t force a bad movie to happen, it just doesn’t work. In some ways, this one proves to be a slightly better film than the first one…and that’s one of the problems. The film doesn’t know what it really wants to be, let alone know what it should be. The performances by Judd Hirsch and Kari Wuhrer are solid enough (under the silly circumstances) that they deserve to be in a better film than this. Meanwhile, the cinematography has significantly improved since the last film, even if the FX might be just as bad as last time. And the film opens with a cameo from Robert Hays as a pilot who debates whether to have the fish or the chicken, in an hilarious reference to his role in the classic spoof “Airplane!” (It’s sharks on a plane, dude!). But it doesn’t belong here in a film that spends most of its time being a cheesy monster movie, not an outright parody, and when you add the genuinely decent work from Hirsch and Wuhrer (who has been in enough crap- and titty movies- to know how to get through something like this without looking embarrassed), it just confuses things even more. The opening scene is genuinely entertaining, and I’m not sure it really should’ve been, but that’s not the kind of ‘unintentional entertainment’ I’m talking about. It ain’t “Plan 9 From Outer Space”.

 

Does this film want to be ‘so bad it’s funny’? A parody? Merely a cheesy B-movie? No, if anything it merely wants to be ‘that movie everyone’s talking about’. And that’s a cop-out. I have no problem with Ian Ziering and Tara Reid returning, but why would anyone else want to jump on board when the first one wasn’t worthwhile itself? Like I said, it’sto be in the movie that everyone’s talking about. If the first film tried too hard and failed to be a bad movie, this one’s trying too hard to bring back memories of that first film, whilst a bunch of C-list names and faces seem to want to jump on the ‘cultural phenomenon’ bandwagon. I doubt it’ll work, with the ‘Subway’ product placement and cameos by Kelly Ripa, Matt Lauer, Al Roker, Billy Ray Cyrus and Andy Dick being the most desperate of all. The ‘spot the celebrity-ish’ game proves more of a distraction than anything. Ian Ziering is as committed as he was before, former sci-fi/softcore babe Kari Wuhrer is here to remind me we’re both getting old and she’s looking better for it than me (And I’m about 10 years younger!). Judah Friedlander for some reason dons a different disguise here, pretty much defeating the purpose of his casting, and Vivica A. Fox is here so we can all kinda sorta recall that she almost used to be somebody.

 

The only way this film was going to work as genuine bad movie fun was if Tara Reid were in the film a whole lot more. Oh my God is she bad in this, and I don’t think it’s as intentional as she thinks. No, the woman either has been rendered facially immobile via plastic surgery, is an alien, or simply has no conception whatsoever of genuine human emotions. They seem foreign to her, and it’s absolutely hilarious to watch. Other than that, it’s kinda cute that the film is set in a cleaned-up New York where apparently guns don’t exist, but overall this film is at once too much of a failure to recommend and not enough of a failure to enjoy in a bad movie kinda way. But ultimately I guess Twitter will be the judge. I think the whole thing can be best summed up like this: Biz Markie turns up in it. I mean, who’s more desperate for ‘buzz’ here, the washed-up Biz Markie, or SyFy for hiring the washed-up Biz Markie, thinking it would be a cool idea?