RiffTrax

Only watched this bucket of excrement and product placement because I love RiffTrax so dearly. Though I am a diehard MST3K/RiffTrax/Cinematic Titanic and b-movie aficionado, I am not pleased that RiffTrax has hooked their wagon to this franchise. Perhaps it is good business sense for RiffTrax to promote itself by riffing on contemporary "so bad it's good" movies" (as with The Room and Birdemic), but my issue here is that Sharknado does not qualify.

Unlike The Room and Birdemic, Sharknado was made this way on purpose. For me this neutralizes any of the jokes that take issue with the preposterousness, inanity, low-quality special FX, bad acting... because that is Sharknado's selling point.

I am not a fan of 'camp' or consciously trashy films (even Hobgoblins treads this line), partly because there is already a substantial supply of horrible films that I don't see why we need to have people deliberately making garbage.

Much like Snakes on a Plane it seems lazy, cynical and exploitative rather than "so bad it's good". Brandishing that rationale for the existence of the film the filmmakers can literally turn in anything and they are covered. The sequences of the film are not even well thought out, something that is not reflective of the budget, but how little anyone cared about what was on the screen. It's rainy and then not, the city is on lockdown and then not, in some scenes people are running in terror, in others people are mere feet from funnels and are just strolling along, sharks show up abruptly and randomly whenever the filmmakers have no idea how to end the scene. All they have to do is making it extra ridiculous and the people are supposed to cheer, forgetting that they have paid to watch product placement and a bunch of desperate hasbeens or neverwases phoning in their performances.

I understand that they can write off inconsistencies, continuity problems and physical impossibilities as "camp" or "goofy", but therein lies the problem. They have simply been given too much of a carte blanche There are plenty of films which do not take themselves seriously and are consciously over-the-top or absurd, but they often try harder than this to be actually entertaining (rather than just awful).

The result is an unwatchable mess that insults the intelligence of the viewer by taking advantage of the faux B-movie shtick as it's excuse for churning out cinematic offal. "It's supposed to be stupid" "It's supposed to be dumb fun". Sure. I think it's actually "supposed to make money". I wonder what happened with their fight with the crew union. I'm sure that was just for fun, too.

Funniest thing about Sharknado 2 is seeing its incessant product placement bite itself on the ass, with their biggest sponsor Subway, spackled over every inch of free space in the film, now underminded by an unfortunate cameo of child-rapist/Subway Spokesperson, Jared Fogle.

the roman empire never died, it just turned into the catholic church