Sharknado 4

I still remember the feeling that stirred in me, the first time I saw a poster for the original Sharknado. That poster created a mild stir, at least among bad movie fans, when it was released well in advance of the first film in 2013. Featuring a maelstrom brimming with sharks, as the title would imply, it simply hit a sweet spot of B-movie absurdity, triggering the same kind of goofy Pavlovian smile you’d also see on my face during a particularly zany segment of professional wrestling. For better or worse, Sharknado represented a certain zenith of willfully suspended disbelief and the embrace of a concept so dumb, it became almost awesome. It was like an entire film conceived by a 6-year-old, and I couldn’t help but give it a positive review for Paste. I even interviewed director Anthony C. Ferrante, after the fact.

The sequel, Sharknado 2: The Second One, effectively upped the ante of the premise while seeming a little more pointless in its execution, and I correspondingly dropped the score just a bit from the series’ first installment.

The third film, Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! represented a more fundamental departure from formula for the series; an added cynicism and growing disdain for its audience that, thankfully, was tempered by enough increased absurdity to be mildly entertaining at the same time. I didn’t savage that movie in my review … although I probably should have, in retrospect.

But don’t worry, the savaging has finally arrived. Because Sharknado 4: The Fourth Awakens, airing Sunday evening on SyFy, is well and truly a platter of hot, fishy garbage. Whatever absurd delights this series once could boast have long since been stripped of their tiny joys and ground into dust by the weight of encroaching, ceaseless, incredibly cynical commercialism. You won’t quite be able to tell if you’re watching Sharknado or a bunch of SyFy executives puppeteering the decaying corpse of a shark that should have long since been committed to the briny depths.

I’m not even entirely sure that Sharknado 4 can reasonably be referred to as “a movie.” Movies, by definition, need to feature performances outside of cameos. Movies can’t be entirely assembled via quotes and blindly transparent references to other movies. Extended bits of product placement do not “a movie” make. I couldn’t help but repeatedly flash back to Red Letter Media’s sublime examination of Adam Sandler’s Jack and Jill and its own whorish fixation on over-the-top product placement. Sharknado aspires to suckle at the same teat, while surround its ads with D-list celebrities and right-wing political pundits.

The story, as it ostensibly exists in the film, picks up some five years after Sharknado 3, in a world that has been safeguarded from the threat of future sharknados by the multinational Astro-X corporation and its weather-regulating technology. Fin Shepard (Ian Ziering), hero of the proletariat, has been laying low, and believes his wife April (Tara Reid) to be dead after being crushed by a shark in the final moments of Sharknado 3. Of course, April isn’t actually dead—instead she’s been rebuilt into some sort of invincible cyborg superhero by her brilliant scientist father, who is naturally played by Gary Busey, because who else are you going to get to play a robotics specialist?

“For lo, I, Tara Reid, the star of Uwe Boll’s Alone in the Dark have been reborn.”

Long story short, the sharknados return for reasons never remotely explained, except they’re now more powerful, resourceful and seemingly sentient than ever. Fueled by alternate materials, we’re now faced with sand ‘nados, fire ‘nados, “boulder ‘nados,” lightning ‘nados and even an atomic ‘nado. They’re all lovingly rendered in the best CGI that money can buy, provided that amount of money is very small and the person doing the animation is being held at gunpoint. Naturally, it’s up to Fin and his family to save the day, per usual. And that’s going to be difficult, given that so much Botox has been pumped into Tara Reid’s face that she literally can’t speak a single line without slurring like a late-career Orson Welles.

And then there’s the cameos. Like other films in the series, Sharknado 4 is completely filled with pointless, substanceless cameos, but this time around they’re really elevating the empty cameo to an art form. There’s literally not a single one that has an impact on the plot, or even the scene—they’re just people who briefly wander onto the screen, all the way from Gilbert Gottfried and Todd Chrisley to “Dog” the Bounty Hunter and former WWE Champion Seth Rollins, who brutally trolls the audience in true heel fashion by promising to “superkick that storm back to the dark ages” before doing no such thing.

To illustrate the blasé way this film treats both cameos and product placement in tandem, let me give one example. We are given a cameo by former UFC World Heavyweight Champion Frank Mir, one of the better grapplers of this generation of mixed martial arts. Does he appear perhaps as a bodyguard or street tough, something where he might use his physicality? Nope. He appears as a man in a hotel who shills for Comcast. This is his only line:

Frank Mir: “Show me CNN.” (TV changes channels)