Sharknado 4: The Fourth Awakens is the bloody, dismembered victim of the Sharknado movies’ weird success.

The Sharknado franchise, at its spinning chaotic core, is a viral beast, a franchise whose life-blood depends on people talking about it. It could have easily come and gone, a passing amusement like so many other ridiculous films from The Asylum. After all there is nothing inherently more ridiculous or interesting about sharks in a tornado than there is about Nazis inside a hollow earth, or using a submarine to move the planet out of the way of an asteroid, or a giant robotic shark fighting a giant non-robotic shark, and they released all those films with relatively little fanfare.

No, we did this. We made this concept in particular something bigger than its creators ever could have intended. When the first Sharknado came out, by a quirk of timing and luck, enough people started talking about it, that it transformed from its original low-rent form into something sticky, viral, memetic.

And from where I’m sitting, that’s not a bad thing. See, I happen to find a certain amount of real enjoyment in these kinds of movies. Not all of them, not by a long shot, but enough that I’m willing sift through the pile filtering the “good” from the “bad.” And Sharknado made that weird fascination of mine just a little more mainstream.

But Sharknado 4: The Fourth Awakens chases that viral success more than it should have, and it gets bogged down in the process.

For starters, the cameos here are out of control. The trailers for Sharknado 4: The Fourth Awakens bragged that it featured cameos from, “everyone who said yes,” and apparently a LOT of people said yes.

Cameos are an important part of the Sharknado brand. Its fandom is built on the lolcopter randomness of seeing Dog the Bounty Hunter pop up to sell chainsaws to our heros. But as the series has progressed the cameos have multiplied at an alarming rate, partly because Sharknado has become so well-known that there’s far less stigma in being attached to it than some other random made-for-TV crap. But Sharknado 4 becomes so bloated with these cameos they get in the way of the story.

And yeah, I can hear you protesting “No one CARES about the story, it’s Sharknado 4, it’s SUPPOSED to be dumb,” and of course it doesn’t have to make sense, and yeah, it should be silly and ridiculous, but even schlock still has to function at some level to be enjoyable. Pacing still matters. Structure still matters. What you put in that structure can be outlandish and silly, but it still needs to work within its own weird internal logic.

But Sharknado 4: the Fourth Awakens crams so much in that everything just turns into noise. It isn’t just the cameos. There’s simply too much stuff in this movie. In theory I’m fine with the concept of different kinds of sharknados. And I think the idea of robot April is pretty cool. AND I liked the Sharknado-busting pods.

But when you have someone parachuting into a sharknado, driving a car off of a building and THEN piloting a prop pirate ship through the streets of Las Vegas in the span of five minutes, eventually it turns into meaningless mush.

You can feel Sharknado 4: The Fourth Awakens chasing those tweetable moments so hard, and it’s understandable, because those tweetable moments are the reason we have a Sharknado 4 at all. But for me there was so much noise, so many different things being thrown at the screen, that the truly laugh-out-loud moments (and there were several doozies) got drowned out in the chaos.

I don’t hate the Sharknado series. They aren’t my favourite bad films, but they pave the way for the shark-based schlock I crave. And that’s why I’m disappointed in Sharknado 4. Because it could be…well “better” might not be the best word, but let’s say “more enjoyable.” And at this point the whole enterprise is in danger of collapsing under the weight of it’s own gravity into a black hole of memes and cameos. And if it goes I fear it may pull the rest of the bad-shark system into its inky swirling event horizon.



Albert lives in Florida where the humidity has driven him halfway to madness, and his children have finished the job. He is the author of The Mulch Pile and A Prairie Home Apocalypse or: What the Dog Saw .

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