Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (2015) – Review

No one expects a SyFy original movie to be good, and back in 2013 when the first Sharknado aired it affirmed that fact, and then for some strange reason it we got Sharknado 2: The Second One which was also bad but gained a little love by embracing the goofiness of it all, and now we have Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! which makes the first two look like Oscar contenders. This movie isn’t just bad, it’s painfully bad.

World-renowned sharknado expert Fin Shepard (Ian Ziering) is invited to the White House so the President can award him the highest civilian honour for his actions fighting sharknados in Los Angeles and New York City, but as the party gets started a sharknado hits and once again our “hero” finds himself battling sharks from the sky. He saves the President’s life and warns him that his “shark sense” tells him that an even bigger sharknado is forming out there, one that could possibly take out the entire East Coast.

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves…or got wiped out by a sharknado.” – Abraham Lincoln.

The worst thing about Sharknado 3, and there a many terrible things wrong with it, but the worst is that it’s barely a movie. This thing is more of a cross between an infomercial for Universal Orlando Theme Park and a Republican wet dream. In this movie we have a white president who won the office on the platform of “Hope and Change” and Republican uber-bitch Ann Coulter is the Vice President, and they even throw in a cameo of Michele Bachmann as herself. I would not be surprised to learn that the screenwriter of this piece of crap worked for Fox News.  When we get Fin and the President running down the halls of the White House with guns blazing I came to the conclusion that this film is possibly running for office itself and is vying for the support of the NRA.

“America, fuck yeah!”

That they didn’t manage to get Ted Nugent in there to play the Speaker of the House seems like a huge missed opportunity to me. But the Right Wing propaganda is still not the worst thing in this movie, it’s the fact that every two seconds we get blatant product placement from the likes of Subway and NASCAR, but most egregiously with a large portion of the running time being of April (Tara Reid), her daughter Claudia (Ryan Newman) and Aprils’ mom May (Bo Derek) as they endlessly wander around the Universal Orlando Theme Park to show us how awesome the attractions are.

“Goddamn it April, don’t tell me you lost our Fast Pass!”

Then there are the cameos, the never-ending onslaught of celebrity cameos. In Sharknado 2 they had some fun cameos that fit in with the joke; like Robert Hayes from Airplane turning up to be the pilot of their plane or Judd Hirsch from Taxi being their taxi driver, but in this third installment there are so many pointless cameos that I’m starting to think that these people must have paid the producers to give them a spot.

Frankie Muniz, this is not how you stage a comeback.

The only actor who escapes this movie with his integrity intact, because he keeps locked in a vault on the moon, is David Hasselhoff who plays Fin’s astronaut father. The Hoff is playing that over-the-top cartoon character that has become the staple of his career, and it works well in the context of a goofy shark movie. This series would have been better off if they’d jettison Ziering and Tara Reid and just had Hasselhoff teaming up with the returning Nova (Cassie Scerbo).

For obvious reasons.

This is not a “So bad it’s good” movie, it’s just bad. Bo Derek seems to have been hired just so Tara Reid isn’t the worst actress on screen, the effects of the flying sharks look shoddier if that’s even possible, and worse the shark attacks themselves have become boring. They try to ramp up the crazy but seeing Fin once again jump into a giant shark just seems tired and played out, even if it’s while riding it through re-entry from outer space. This is the worst case of trying too hard that I’ve ever seen.

In conclusion, “Long live the Hoff!”