The Last Sharknado: It’s About
Time
Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty (harty@lasalle.edu)
Medievally
Speaking may not be the most obvious venue for a
review of the sixth (and supposedly last) installment of the Syfy Channel’s Sharknado franchise, but this last Sharknado made-for-television film does
include a wonderful segment set in Camelot.
Within the academy, we have of late been having any number
of heady and heated discussions about the history, legacy, and current state of
medievalism and Medieval Studies. And
such discussions are welcome and healthy, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the
fact that the phenomenon we call medievalism is fueled by its continued ubiquity
in popular culture. Thus “the medieval” continues
to pop up in commercials for beer, pizza, auto parts, cell phones, insurance,
and financial planning, to name only a few products and services that have recently
eagerly embraced some version of the Middle Ages in their advertising and
marketing campaigns.
Film and television continue to present their own version of
“the medieval”—admittedly with mixed results—but we have recently had
appearances of elements from the Arthuriad in a number of cinematic genres
where we might not expect them, such as a spy film, a Mad Max film, a
transformers film, and a film based on a video game. Television too has given us a fairly riveting
series on the Vikings and on Alfred the Great, and not so riveting series set on
the Welsh borderlands under Edward II, and another about the Templars and their
search for the Holy Grail in fourteenth-century France.
All of which brings me to the Syfy channel’s 2018
made-for-television film The Last Sharknado:
It’s About Time. The franchise began in 2013 with a made-for-television
film, Sharknado, on the Syfy channel
that, to everyone’s surprise, became an instant cult hit. The original film and its sequels (all
directed by Anthony C. Ferrante) combine multiple genres—comedy, disaster, gore-fest,
science fiction—and are worthy successors to the B-movies that were made in the
1950s and 1960s. The films are puerile,
jejune, gross, badly acted, cheaply made, and improbably plotted. Depending upon a viewer’s tolerance for low culture,
the films are either hysterically funny, or just plain stupid.
A sharknado is nothing less than a gigantic cyclone that has
sucked up hordes of man-eating sharks which are then dumped on land where they
threaten to devour the entire population of a city. Thanks to Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws (from a 1974 novel by Peter
Benchley), sharks as monsters have become part of our cultural fabric—the Sharknado franchise just stretches that
fabric as far as it can. The hero of the franchise is a bar-owner and surfer
named, appropriately, Fin Shepard (Ian Ziering), who in the first film sets out
to rescue his estranged wife, April (Tara Reid), and their teenage daughter
before the sharknado that has hit Los Angeles reaches them. The sequels see Fin
and April defending New York and Washington, DC, from subsequent sharknados,
until a final sharknado in the fifth film, Sharknado
5: Global Swarming (2017), triggers the end of the world. Each sequel introduces
additional characters, and features guest appearances from an eclectic group of
actors and celebrities, all of whom seem to have come along for the ride for
the laughs.
In the final installment of the franchise, Fin, with help
from April, who may or may not be dead, and their son, Gil, travel back in time
to undo all the previous sharknados to prevent the apocalypse that ended the
previous film. They begin in the age of
dinosaurs in a segment that pays homage to Jurassic
Park—the Sharknado franchise is
filled with references and nods to any number of film and television
series. Just when things look bleak and
hopeless, April arrives astride a pterodactyl, Fin undoes the first sharknado,
and he and his companions fast forward to what they anticipate being the
present, only to find themselves in Camelot.
That April astride the pterodactyl is a clone of Daenerys
Targaryen astride her dragon from A Game of
Thrones is no accident, and indeed the inhabitants of Camelot mistake the
pterodactyl for a dragon. And like one
of the dragon in Thrones, April’s
pterodactyl is shot down by a giant arrow.
In Camelot, Fin and company first encounter a bewildered peasant, whom
Fin repeatedly calls “Frodo”—pace
Professor Tolkien. And Camelot is
already under siege by the evil Morgana played by a snarling, over-the-top
Alaska Thunderfuck from RuPaul’s Drag Race,
though any student of cinema Arthuriana will recognize her as simply the latest
in a long series of snarling, over-the-top Morgana-like figures. Morgana’s nemesis is Merlin, here played in
one of the film’s best in jokes by the popular physicist Neil deGrasse
Tyson. And thanks to Mark Twain, time
travel and medievalism have long been connected to each other.
Morgana wants Excalibur and the throne of Camelot. Merlin is intent upon preventing her, and upon
helping Fin, whose son Gil was at one point Merlin’s tutor, return to the
present. Morgana’s plans are interrupted
by the appearance of another sharknado, and an armor-clad Fin pulls Excalibur
from the stone, though the sword’s blade turns into a chain saw, in a nod to
Bruce Campbell’s Ash in another apocalyptic Arthurian movie, Army of Darkness. Fin defeats the sharknado
using Excalibur and some catapults, and Morgana goes up in flames screaming
“I’m melting,” just like the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz. Sharknado is certainly catholic in its
nods and references to other films and forms of popular culture. When Fin and company catapult out of Camelot,
they land in George Washington’s embattled camp where they encounter a surly
Alexander Hamilton (played by popular television economist Ben Stein), who is
the butt of any number of jokes referencing the highly successful Broadway
musical that bears his name.
Neil deGrasse Tyson as Merlin
The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time, directed by Anthony J.
Ferrante, written by Thunder Levin and Scotty Mullen, The Asylum and Syfy
Films; first broadcast on the Syfy Channel on August 19, 2018.
Kevin J. Harty, La
Salle University
