Sharknado

Dr. Jeff Masters from Weather Underground with his take on the movie…I detect a patronizing hint of a weather geek in his comments…funny…

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/article.html?entrynum=2466

Can a Sharknado hit Los Angeles?
By Dr. Jeff Masters
Published: 1:38 PM GMT on July 17, 2013
I learned something from watching the movie “Sharknado”, SyFy Channel’s twisted cross between Jaws, The Day After Tomorrow, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which premiered last Thursday (and will be aired again this Thursday.) My hurricane disaster kit is incomplete without a chainsaw. Not only can a chainsaw come in handy to remove fallen debris after the storm–it can be an essential self-defense weapon in case a hurricane spawns a “Sharknado”–a powerful waterspout that picks up man-eating sharks out of the ocean and hurls them miles inland.

“Sharknado” is set in Los Angeles, where huge and dangerous Hurricane David is making landfall. The satellite images of the hurricane show a very nasty-looking storm that is at least Category 3, but has the rather unusual (and impossible) characteristic that it spins clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere. Thousands of bloodthirsty sharks swarm inland with the hurricane’s storm surge and are hurled through the air by the EF-4 waterspouts turned tornadoes that accompany the storm. A lot of blood spurts, a lot of bad acting and lame dialog occur, and plenty of improbable or impossible meteorological events happen–complete with cheesy computer graphic animations. (“Sharknado” seriously challenges The Day After Tomorrow for greatest number of impossible meteorological events packed into a single movie.) But, as long as you don’t take the movie too seriously, and look at it as a campy low-budget parody of both disaster movies and horror movies, “Sharknado” is a hoot. I give “Sharknado” two stars (out of four.) The movie is produced by “B” movie studio Asylum, and stars Ian Ziering and Tara Reid. “Sharknado” is airing again at 7pm EDT/6pm CDT on Thursday, July 18,