Sharknado 2: The Second One (2014) – Review

This is the sequel that no-one wanted, to the film that no-one really wanted in the first place, but somehow took the world by storm (aha…) with its simple, ridiculous concept that requires no explanation beyond the single-word title: Sharknado. I didn’t review Sharknado but beyond capturing the “deliberately terrible” tone pretty well in all of two or three main setpieces it was a movie totally without merit. Production values were non-existent, and it was clearly thrown together without any care to sell purely on concept alone. Writing this out I’m starting to wonder why I just spent another 90 minutes watching the sequel…

Because it is absolutely brilliant.

I could just end the review there to be honest, but I should probably backpedal slightly. It is of course absolutely, unspeakably, painfully awful, but anyone who sees “Syfy presents – The Asylum Productions” on the screen and even for a second thinks “Oh this should be good!” desperately needs electric shock therapy or something. We know that the film will make no sense, that it will be brain-numbingly stupid, and that characters will be at best nonexistent. The film opens with Fin and April, stars of the first movie, flying to New York to promote the book “How To Survive A Sharknado & Other Unnatural Disasters”. In the worst case of bad luck (or perhaps unspeakably bad piloting) the plane flies directly into a tornado which just happens to be teeming with sharks. I noticed quite soon on that the production values were 10 times those of the original, but mathematicians among you will know that 10 x 0 = 0 so that’s perhaps not saying much. The carnage breaks out almost instantly, with no attempt to build up tension or make us care who’s getting chomped by the sharks but it really doesn’t matter because practically every shot is a gory visual gag so there’s plenty to keep you amused.  This follows for most of the film; overblown, nonsensical action sequences are never far away & while you can’t always be entirely sure why they break out, you don’t care. It’s sort of like if a load of Christmas presents arrived in the post in mid-July – it’s best not to ask questions, just enjoy it.

It really doesn’t matter.

Fin & April eventually make it to New York where Fin’s sister’s family live allowing some half-baked family drama & romantic drama with Fin’s ex to give the writers an excuse when they get told off for throwing toy sharks around the office making explosion sounds. We follow our supposed heroes as they stumble around Manhattan failing to save any innocent civilians, failing to drive a truck in a straight line, failing to ride bikes, and generally failing miserably at the everyday obstacles that present themselves, accompanied by a script written almost entirely in one-liners that range from witlessly flat to ‘so stupid that I’d smash my face against a cheese grater to un-hear that line’. Countless celebrity cameos play the people they encounter along their way – or at least so I’m lead to believe because I recognised only a couple of them, they’re easy to spot however because their characters almost always serve no purpose to the plot, and are performed with slightly worse acting than the rest of the cast. Repeated sequences featuring The Today Show among other real-life TV shows actually fit really well, with the presenters of the shows clearly having a great time hamming up the awful scripts (The Weather Channel presenter reports that “sharks will be falling at a rate of 2 inches an hour” without even breaking a smirk). The final setpiece, which I won’t spoil, is possibly the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen but by this point my brain had been pummeled into a weak acceptance, resulting in it seeming at the time like the greatest moment in cinematic history.

“SHAAARRKS OOOON FIIIREEEE”… Rocky IV? No? Okay…

This may seem like an incredibly negative review, but such is the impossible-to-comprehend charm of a film like this that every seemingly bad point above somehow works in its favour. It’s undoubtedly much more enjoyable than the first, worryingly managing to pull off a deliberate “so-bad-it’s-good” tone in a way that I’ve not really seen before. Put your brain in the fridge for a couple of hours & you’ll be able to appreciate the true appeal of this film. The third installment has already been promised for this July so it looks like there’s no escaping this particular guilty pleasure / torture (depending on your perspective) just yet.

5/10

The Last Exorcism: Part 2 (2013) – Review

When referring to ‘The Worst Movies Ever Made’, it’s important to be clear on what exactly qualifies. There are films that an individual has absolutely no interest in, in my case that would include those melodramas they show on obscure Sky channels, and probably even many romantic comedies. In such cases, it would be unfair for me to say any one of them is ‘The Worst Movie Ever Made’. Films that are massive successes only for me to find I hate them, such as Mamma Mia!; a film that I despise with every inch of my being; could also not fit in as it is feasible to see how someone who isn’t me may enjoy them and they are capable enough if we consider the target audience. Then we move on to those we know to be truly terrible, but are so spectacularly off-the-mark that they become funny, such as Troll 2 or The Room. These also can’t fit in here I believe as (whether intentional or not) they have a comedy value that is unmatched by deliberately funny films, giving the films a bittersweet redeeming feature after all. There are many terrible films that were produced on essentially no budget, so the mere existence of the films is reflective of dedication and hard work by a small number of individuals so it is unfair to be unduly harsh on these I feel. So now we are left with those films that are produced on reasonable budget, with a supposed level of professionalism behind the production, that we ought to like based on genre and content, that we understand the technicalities of, yet are just absolutely atrocious in ways that make you wonder how they got it so wrong. A film such as The Last Exorcism: Part 2.

The improbably titled sequel to the 2010 found-footage horror didn’t have too much to live up to, after the third act disappointment in the first, where all the rather intriguing religious pondering and uncertain characters were cast aside for a generic occult-shocker explosive finale. Swapping out the found-footage for a standard cinematic style, we pick up very soon after the events of the first, with Nell recovering from the events and put into a doors-unlocked-at-night girls’ rehabilitation home despite firmly believing that the demon Abalam is still intent on acquiring her soul. The following 45 minutes or so feature nothing much in the way of excitement as we follow Nell making friends with her housemates, having completely unintelligent internal religious debate in the form of deciding whether or not to put her crucifix on, meeting a boy for some awkward romance scenes more applicable to a Disney Channel movie, and being terrified by street performers staring at her in carnival masks. Yes, this is an 18-rated horror and we’re somehow supposed to be scared, or at least mildly unsettled, by a normal person looking at us in a mask.

Terrifying. (This is an actual screencap)

Without spoiling the rest of the plot, in the second half of the film the terror is ramped up by a notch (putting it at level one), with some night-time oddness suggesting Abalam is indeed not as far away as Nell was starting to hope. We are now fast-tracked to the third act with a few key characters appearing out of thin air, exposition as to their purpose and how they come to be here explained away by single lines that outline the biggest gripe of the film; it feels like watching a first draft of the script, as though no one looked back and thought “Does this make sense?”, “Could that character be worked into the storyline any more?”, “Could a single bloody moment of this film be even the least bit interesting?”. Apparently they asked none of these questions, because unfortunately the answer to them all is a big “No”. We work our way to the inevitable exorcism scene which unfolds without any real menace or sense of crescendo to the wafer-thin plot.

You WILL watch it til the end!

As I may have mentioned, for what is intended to be a horror movie, this film is not at all scary. We are treated to one or two pooorly-executed jump-scares and the sense of impending doom never grows much stronger than the realisation that the film is still nowhere near finishing. In such a case, where the plot offers no intrigue, and the characters vary from dull to actively dislikable, a horror fan reverts to the promise offered by the 18 certificate on the box: there’ll surely be some delightfully gory or uniquely scary scenes. Well, the final part of the third act comes and sure enough a number of rather unpleasant things happen, the only thing is we don’t get to see any of it explicitly. An argument could be made that this is intelligent, eschewing the joyous brutality of modern torture porn-esque horror but based on the first 70 minutes of screenplay this is certainly not an intelligent film and the first film featured enough finger-snapping, cat-smashing, head-lopping horror that I really don’t think this was their intent. The film ends on a jarring note, on one hand an interesting turn for the story, but on the other hand very derivative of a certain iconic female-fronted horror. It does however leave us with the most terrifying moment of the whole piece; the set up of a Part 3.

The Last Exorcism: Part 2 is a film produced on a reasonable budget for horror of $5 million, with a decent cast; especially Ashley Bell, playing Nell with the same vulnerability she showed in the first film, in key scenes reminiscent of Sissy Spacek in Carrie. The failure of the film is that the screenplay has no polish, there is little to no direction and while shot technically well, it offers no interesting visuals of any kind, save for the aforementioned finale which even then is spoiled by CGI that seems to have been rendered on a PlayStation 2.

Is this the single worst film ever made? Probably not, but it’s certainly amongst the worst ‘well-made’ films I’ve seen, being produced with so many fundemental issues that could have been fixed very easily to salvage the bare bones of the plot that could have made a worthwhile follow-up to the first film. If not the worst of all time, this is certainly the worst I have seen of 2013.

1/10