Sharknado (2013)

Sharknado arrives from the Syfy channel and The Asylum with a title that announces its intentions and a budget that confirms them. A hurricane lifts sharks out of the Pacific and deposits them over Los Angeles, where they consume a variety of Angelenos and exactly one dog. The film's ambitions begin and end there. It is a creature feature built on a pun, and it knows it, and it proceeds anyway.

We searched, as is our duty, for signs of contemporary social instruction. We found a barmaid named Nova who handles a firearm, survives a childhood shark attack, and is swallowed whole before being cut free from a shark's interior by a man with a chainsaw. This is not a statement about gender. It is a statement about sharks. A shark fin smuggler appears in the opening minutes and is promptly eaten, which discourages any reading of the film as an indictment of late capitalism. The weather is not a metaphor for anything. It is weather with sharks in it. The cast is largely white, and the few minority performers are absorbed into the general chum without comment.

Nobody in this film delivers a speech about anything except the practical logistics of the storm. The result is a work of near-perfect ideological silence, which in 2013 was its own kind of achievement. Critics at the time called it proudly, shamelessly, and gloriously brainless, and we see no reason to argue. Some films are sermons. This one is a tornado full of fish. It asks nothing of us and offers nothing back, and there is a strange integrity in that arrangement. We score it accordingly, without malice, and move on to the next screening.