“It wouldn’t be Texas without a chainsaw massacre.”

Justin’s rating: This is even less plausible than the one on the moon.

Justin’s review: When we decided on doing a Mutant Shark Week this year, I sighed so deeply that I used a part of my lungs that I’ve kept in reserve for my opera career. That’s because I knew that I couldn’t put it off any longer — it was time to bite into another one of the Sharknado movies, even if the sheer stupidity turned me into a babbling fool.*

In preparation for the third sequel, I slammed my forehead against a metal table a dozen or so times and then hit “play” on Sharknado: The 4th Awakens. Because there’s nothing like a terrible pun title that makes you stare deadpan at the film itself, Christopher Walken-style, until it flinches and apologizes.

Even though it was only a year since the broadcast of Sharkado 3, the fourth movie asserts that it’s been five years and that some tech company’s stabilized the world’s atmosphere so that none of these sharknados can form again. Has peace come to the world at last? Haha no, we don’t even get to 10 minutes and the first commercial break before a sharknado forms over Las Vegas and sucks up all of the sharks there (of which there are more than the expected zero for the region).

The one interesting meta-event around this movie is that Syfy allowed viewers to campaign on social media whether Tara Reid’s April survived or died following the events of the previous movie. Shocker, of course she’s back, now with a cyborg body, a gallon of botox, and Swiss army arm that sports the cheesiest of all special effects. Also back is the duller-than-dirt Fin (Ian Ziering), praying that shark movie contracts can put his kids through college and another garage extension on his house.

Following the surprise Las Vegas sharknado, the animal-themed tornadoes only get more and more ridiculous as they absorb different elements (rock sharks, tar sharks, nuclear sharks, etc.) as Fin and company go on another cross-country road trip. I guess these elemental sharks give the computer graphics team a fun playground, but it feels like someone flipping through every available filter to justify the price of buying the software.

I said during the Sharknado 3 review that these Asylum features drew out C-list celebrities in droves. Well, now we’re down to D-list, including Carrot Top, Lloyd Kaufman, David Hasselhoff, Gary Busey, Gilbert Gottfried, Steve Guttenberg, Bud from Married… with Children, Gena Lee Nolan, one of the bad guys from Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and Christine, the actual car from the movie Christine. And because it’s so prominent and frequent, I’m going to include “shameless product placement” on that list as well.

While most everyone’s collecting a paycheck with the most minimum of acting effort, the one noticeable exception is Tara Reid. I don’t know what they put in her coffee that week, but she is hyper, intense, and all-in with her performance. It’s almost mesmerizing to watch her launch into scenes with this juiced-up gym endorphin rush of “LET’S GOOOOOOO YOU SAD LOSERS!” attitude. She’s trying so hard, all the time, while nobody around her quite knows how to handle her intensity.

“Dial it down, Ms. Reid, please,” you can imagine some of the sharks begging.

I’m pretty sure that these movies are designed solely by random setpieces and film homages scribbled on post-its, which are then handed to a screenwriter to piece together. So we have things like “Las Vegas skydiving,” and “swashbuckling fight on a pirate ship,” and “Baywatch,” and “blow up the Grand Canyon,” and “throw the Eiffel Tower in Niagara Falls” stitched into an incomprehensible quilt of ratings pandering.

Even if you like shark movies and silly B-movie stupidity, I’d still advise you to pass on this. There’s nothing here of any value, period. Sorry, Carrot Top.

*More so, I mean.

Intermission!

• Hey, it’s a Star Wars-style opening text crawl. That’s never ever ever been done in a movie since 1977. So original. So clever.
• Fighting sharks on the moon
• “Don’t go to prison!”
• A shark hologram in the middle of a road doesn’t seem that safe to me
• Carrot Top by minute 3
• Sharknado slot machine
• “I know what you’re thinking, but we haven’t seen a sharknado in five years.”
• Chippendale dancers are trained to fight flying sharks
• You can steer a falling car by opening and closing doors
• The sharks frolicking in the Las Vegas fountains was worth a chuckle
• Also good, the crude animation comic book-style of the opening credits (sharks with frickin’ laser beams!)
• Bouldernado!
• “Who would want to destroy the Grand Canyon?”
• April has a lightsaber arm now
• Gilbert Gottfried as a storm chaser? No thank you.
• “We got a lot of work to do… a lot of movies to see.”
• Sharknados like to stalk individual cars
• Small Texas towns often have chainsaw stores, sometimes with Dog the Bounty Hunter
• Five fire extinguishers is enough to put out a giant firestorm? I guess. Whatever.
• I don’t think Gary Busey and Tara Reid are actually in the same room for this argument scene
• Steve Guttenberg is looking awfully sweaty as he cross-promotes his own awful Asylum flick
• “The ashes are your dog.”
• You can effortlessly pick up a 300-pound shark by its tail and then slam it against a lamppost once to explode it. That’s physics.
• Cownado… OK I’m done with this stupid film

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