You’ll be reassured to learn that Sharknado 6 isn’t very good. Spoilers are embargoed until premiere, so I can’t tell you which hifalutin piece of cinema it references in its very first frame, nor how Tara Reid makes her entrance. I can’t even tell you the genuinely ridiculous way in which she leaves. Believe me, that breaks my heart.
I can tell you that, following the destruction of the entire world back at the end of Sharknado 5, the plot involves Ian Ziering travelling back through time to destroy the first Sharknado. And I can probably tell you, since it’s less a spoiler and more a direct continuation of the entire series, that the special effects look like they were made for a bet by a drunk toddler and everyone who makes a cameo either looks kidnapped or concussed.
However, Sharknado 6 bears the subtitle The Last Sharknado for a reason. Unless the whole thing is rebooted next year – and let’s not rule that out – this is it. Sharknado, the silliest, stupidest, most self-aware, most boring B-movie series in the history of film, ends here. And this is exactly the right time for it to bow out.
Sharknado was never a particularly original idea. The Asylum had been churning out bad, low-budget creature features (Zombie Apocalypse) and piggybacking movie rip-offs (Transmorphers) at an almost monthly clip for over a decade before anybody even knew what a Sharknado was. 2009’s Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus, in which two giant sea creatures battled it out to the obvious consternation of Debbie Gibson, marked another step forward thanks to its gimmicky casting and shallow veneer of self-awareness.
But everything lined up for Sharknado. It had an irresistibly silly premise (a tornado made of sharks threatens America), a knowing line of stunt-casting (Ian Ziering and Tara Reid) and a big fat wink instead of any emotional stakes (see the ending, where Ziering is eaten by a shark only to cut his way out with a chainsaw). The execution was botched, but the inventiveness more than made up for it. It was like watching an early Sam Raimi film, if Sam Raimi didn’t really know how to make films very well.
As tends to be the case with successes like these, sequels were greenlit that only helped to diminish the punchdrunk silliness of the first film. Slowly, the films began to eat themselves, getting clogged up with cameos of ever decreasing stature (Kate Garraway appeared in Sharknado 5) and groanworthy movie references, and the hell-for-leather spirit that made the first outing so fun quickly ended up weighing the series down with a lumpen mythology that included but was not limited to space travel, robot limbs, lavanados, lightningnados, nukenados and the use of sharks as medical-grade defibrillators.
With that in mind, Sharknado 6 couldn’t be anything but the end of things. In the third act, everything piles up to such an unwatchably stupid head that there’s genuinely nowhere left for Sharknado to go. Or, arguably, the entire Asylum ethos. Sure, it’ll carry on making films, but nothing else it produces will be able to jam its tongue in its cheek quite as hard as Sharknado. Sharknado wasn’t great – it barely managed to be good most of the time – but its memory will live on forever.
For what is The Meg, a film where Jason Statham and a little dog battle a shark the size of an ocean liner, if not a certain sign of Sharknado’s legacy? The Meg is what Sharknado would be if it was made with any money or talent, and it is ultimately what will propel our weird fascination for knowingly silly shark films to the next level.
And The Asylum will be just fine. After all, this week it released Megalodon; a film made to piggyback on the success of The Meg, which was heavily inspired by Sharknado. So that’s a company making a rip-off of a film that ripped off its own film. Maybe we aren’t done eating ourselves just yet after all.
The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time will air in the US on 19 August and in the UK on 20 August, both on Syfy
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