The Last Sharknado: It's About Time Review

Ha ha, get it? Because it's about time they finished this silly franchise. Six movies is plenty, especially since most people jumped off board after the first or second one, if they even bought into the idea in the first place. Oh, but wait! In addition to the subtitle "It's About Time" being a reflection of this franchise finally ending, this last Sharknado is literally about time. As in time travel. See? They're so funny! OK, you probably all caught that double meaning the second you saw the title, but I think half of the fun with these Sharknado films are those subtitles. "Sharkado 2: The Second One." "Sharkando 3: Oh He-- No!" "Sharknado 4: The Fourth Awakens" (which was released the year after "The Force Awakens"). "Sharknado 5: Global Swarming" (released during the same summer as Al Gore's second global warming documentary "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power"). And finally we have our sixth one that we're talking about today, "The Last Sharknado: It's About Time." Now this is a franchise where you're either in or you're out. And you probably know exactly where you stand the second you watch 5-10 minutes of any of the movies, but since I haven't yet talked about this franchise on this blog, I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to get my thoughts out.

Sharknado was a franchise that began back in 2013 and became quite the phenomenon. Dare I say... it took the world by storm? Because, yeah, making an purposely bad movie that ends up being so bad that it's good is a tricky thing to do. There's probably hundreds, if not thousands, of movies where the filmmakers tried to make an enjoyably bad movie, but failed miserably and wound up with a movie that's simply really bad, resulting in something that was forgotten about shortly after release and only is remembered briefly when it shows up in one of those 10-movie packs in the $5 bin at your local Walmart because that's literally the only way anyone might be tricked into buying it as no sane person would do so otherwise. There's also plenty of examples of movies where a person honestly tried to make a good movie, but failed so miserably that the final result ended up being hilarious for reasons unintentional to the original filmmakers. "The Room" by Tommy Wiseau is a classic example of that and has hit such a high cult status that a movie called "The Disaster Artist" was made last year about the making of that movie. "Sharknado" is neither of these. It's an example of an attempt at a purposely bad movie that was hilariously awesome. And it worked.

In fact, it worked so well that the first movie has become cemented into our culture to the point where it basically stands side by side with "Jaws" in terms of how iconic it is in shark cinema, but for completely opposite reasons. "Jaws" is a perfect example of a GOOD shark movie while "Sharknado" is a perfect example of a BAD shark movie. Love it or hate it, you've definitely heard about it. Which proves my point of its iconic status. If we were to do a "Family Feud" style of survey where we asked people to name a shark movie, "Jaws" and "Sharknado" would most assuredly be the top two answers on the board. When it comes to a critical standpoint, I can't in good conscience give any of these six Sharknado movies a pass because the acting is horrible, the story is horrible, the movie has no sense of logic or common sense, the effort of including science in the movies is always embarrassing, and the special effects are literally some of the worst you'll ever see when it comes to a movie made post-2010. These are literally horrendously awful movies. But that's kinda the point. If you want a serious shark movie that actually tries, go re-watch "Jaws" or check out recent shark movies "The Shallows," "47 Meters Down" or "The Meg." "Sharknado" is for turning off your brain and enjoying.

I never actually watched any of these movies live on TV until now, but I'm one of those people who was immediately on board the second I heard of it, even though I think it took me a while before I actually watched it. I may not have even seen it until the second one came out a year later in 2014. But I loved it. In fact, I remember really loving both of the first two movies. Even though the production quality was pure garbage, I was highly entertained from start to finish at the pure absurdity of it all. I mean, who wouldn't be entertained at a tornado full of sharks flying everywhere with exaggerated deaths left and right while our heroes, led almost single-handedly by Ian Ziering's character of Fin Shepard, use pretty much anything and everything as weapons to stop these sharks? For crying out loud, the man jumped through a shark with a chainsaw at one point. The first time I saw that, I was practically dying from laughter. And when a movie makes you laugh that hard, and consistently does so throughout the first two movies, there has to be a lot of credit given, despite the previously acknowledged flaws. There's a reason why the first movie has an 82 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes while the second one isn't too far behind at 59 percent.

But then there's the case of the rest of the movies. Because, yes, they kept on doing this once a year, even though the novelty of it wore off pretty quickly and many people don't even realize the sequels exist. I personally admit to being one of said individuals who just didn't care that much after the first two. I never even watched any of them past the second one until this summer. Back in April I excitedly showed a group of my friends "2001: A Space Odyssey" in honor of its 50th anniversary. Sadly most of them hated it, which made me upset a bit since it's my all-time favorite sci-fi film. But it sparked this idea to go watch a different type of sci-fi film. This Sharknado franchise. So over the course of the summer, we watched all six of these Sharknado films, ending with the sixth one last night, which initially debuted on the Syfy Channel on Sunday evening. And yes, we all thoroughly enjoyed all of them. In fact, this group setting is important to note because a big part of the reason why we enjoyed them is the camaraderie among us friends. This franchise is designed to gather a group of friends together and laugh at the absurdity of it all. If you watch the movies by yourself at night on Netflix (the first five are there), I don't think it's going to be the same.

On the flip side of that, the biggest problem I have with the Sharknado sequels, like an actual problem that was detrimental to my entertainment, because at this point I don't care how poorly made they are, is that it's really hard to remember which events happened in which movie. And it's not like I had a year in between to forget the specific events. They're all fresh on my mind. When we watched the fourth and fifth movies, we had new people join us and I honestly had a really hard time giving a basic outline of what happened chronologically in the previous movies that, in some cases, we had watched the week before. A new character would show up, requiring a quick explanation of who they are and which movie they're from, and I struggled. I had to turn to IMDb to remind myself which side characters were in which movie while looking up a Wikipedia summary of who the characters actually were, even though the faces looked familiar. Thus each of the movies were all extremely enjoyable in the moment, making for some excellent summer memories of 2018 in going through all of them, but now that it's been a month since we watched the fifth and when this sixth one debuted on TV, all the Sharknado sequels blend together to make one giant cluster of Sharknadoism.

All of that leads us into the specifics with this final movie that I have listed here in my review title. At this point I feel I should re-title this review to read "Franchise Review: Sharknado" or something like that since this has been more of a review of the whole franchise, but eh. You get the point. Quite honestly, this final movie is one where I have very mixed feelings with. On one hand, whereas the first five movies all clump together, making me think that the original "Sharknado" is really the only one that needs to be watched, this final movie is one where it's definitely easy to separate from the rest because it's the first movie where they added a bit of creativity to the plot instead of simply trying to one-up themselves with bigger and more disastrous Sharknados. This is the movie where they went back in time, giving us a non-stop stream of "Back to the Future" references the whole movie. And not only did they go back in time, they went through a whole bunch of different time periods, beginning with the dinosaurs and progressively going forward until the year 20013. And no, that's not a type. They go 18,000 years into the future before finally ending in 2013, where this all began. And for that I give this movie a lot of props instead of rinsing, washing and repeating the previous movies.

On the other hand, the movie ended up being a Sharknado highlight reel. I was super excited for Sharknados and dinosaurs to come together. And while those moments were glorious, especially since it was a Megalodon Sharknado, it lasted only 10-15 minutes before we were onto the next time period. For the first half of the movie, the individual time periods were a lot of fun with some hilarious sequences, but they felt like more of a series of Sharknado short films instead of a fully realized idea. Each of the individual time periods could've been expanded into a full Sharknado movie and the individual movies would've been much better that the small sequences crammed into one movie. At the very least, what they could've done is edit things down into two or three main sequences instead of the total of eight different time periods that they ended up with. I would've probably gone for dinosaurs, Merlin, and the Wild West because those were the three best segments of the movie that they could've done the most with if they had more time in each segment. Then after going through all three of those time periods, we could've nicely wrapped things back up in 2013 like they did, because that was a nice send-off to this franchise.

The other major problem with this crammed plot that I speak of is that those three best sequences are all towards the first half of the movie. They do go to the Revolutionary War in between Merlin and the Wild West, but that part comes off as unhilariously awkward. The second half of the movie is actually kinda boring. When we went to the 70's, the 90's and 20013, I found myself not really caring for the movie. I think a part of that was because the opening title sequence was animated and included brief sequences of Abraham Lincoln Shark Hunter and Nazi Sharks. That had me excited because I thought those were going to be in the REAL movie, so I spent the whole movie excitedly anticipating them, only to feel robbed that they weren't in the movie, but were just in that opening title sequence. As if they ran out of budget with the first half of production, so they decided to go even more low-budget by hanging out in the 70's and 90's because that was easier to accomplish rather than delivering on what they initially planned on. That and their rules for time travel made no sense and there was a story between Fin Shepard and his son Gil that was really hard to follow, but because this was a Sharknado movie, I found myself not being too bothered by those last two points.

When push comes to shove, I've decided that I'll simply stick to "Legends of Tomorrow" when it comes to time traveling shows because "The Last Sharknado" followed a similar formula as "Legends" by jumping through time. In fact, every sequence in "The Last Sharknado" is a time period that "Legends" has spent a significant time in. But "Legends" is way more thought out, has much better writing and acting, and is more cohesive and organized rather than just being a whole ton of small segments crammed into one 90-minute movie just because they can. Given that we watched this movie on TV with commercials, the commercial breaks ended up derailing the movie quite a bit and the second half of the movie wasn't interesting enough to completely grab our attention back. We got lost in conversation during the commercials and the movie felt like it was interrupting our conversations when it came back on. So perhaps wait until this shows up on Netflix to watch it? As far as a grade goes, I can't realistically give any of these movies higher than a 5/10 because of how bad they are, so that's why I'm creating my own specialized Sharnado scale. A 10 Shark score equals laugh out loud hilarious while a 1 Shark score equals bored to tears. This final Sharnado gets a 6 Shark score.