TV Movie Review: <i>Sharknado 4: The 4th Awakens</i>

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This is your annual reminder that another Sharknado film premiered on Syfy this week titled Sharknado 4: The 4th Awakens. Get it? Like Star Wars: The Force Awakens? Haha. Yeah. Okay. Moving on.

Every year for the past four years, we’ve gotten a Sharknado film and every year I find myself watching them for reasons I can’t explain. They are dumb movies, plain and simple. But they are dumb, fun movies, and I guess that makes all the difference. Sharknado also appeals to me because it mixes two of my childhood dream jobs together — a marine biologist and a tornado chaser. So, they have that going for them.

This fourth Sharknado is probably the worst of them, but the scale I’m using here is based solely on how much fun I have watching these films. At the start of the movie, it’s been five years since the last sharknado, and that’s all thanks to a clean energy company headed by Aston Reynolds (Tommy Davidson) that can stop sharknados as soon as they start forming. But, as these films usually do, where ever Finn Shepard (Ian Ziering) goes, so does another sharknado. This time, it’s Las Vegas.

There’s an interesting commentary here about corporations banking off tragedy (Reynolds’ new hotel is centered around sharks), and when a sand storm crops up right outside his hotel, sharks from the hotel get swept up in the storm, creating another sharknado: sand version. This large corporation is pretty much directly responsible for this new sharknado because they decided to get rich off the tragedies surrounding sharknados. See? There’s more to these films than you probably thought.

After this sand sharknado, the storm starts evolving and picking up other things besides sharks. Characters start yelling out ridiculous lines such as “It’s a oilnado!” or “It’s a firenado!” And then, my favorite “It’s a cownado!” in a blatant reference to Twister. I can’t tell if this was serious, or the film’s way of poking fun at itself and being self-aware of the fact that these films’ premises are essentially that a tornado can pick up anything and be called something else. Regardless, it’s all over-the-top and we kind of like it that way.

Things just weren’t as fun this time around. The cast of celebrity cameos getting eaten by sharks wasn’t as exciting, and let’s be real, that’s the best part of these things, right? I really have nothing else to say here, except that we’ll probably get another one of these next year and I’ll most likely watch it because I don’t know how to order my list of priorities.

Rating: 5/10

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