Heroes used to dread their appointed hours, would resist the call, dart around asking for help from civilians who all suddenly turn coward or complacent. They'd blame poor marksmanship, or their Quaker faith, or Ingrid Bergman sticking them for the cost of a train ticket back in Paris, or all the droids or cows needing repair back... home, as their flimsy excuses to hold off on heroism until some Nazi made it... personal. But now, in today's crowded sci fi/horror climate, well, just try and stop the Munchausen Chicken Little, especially if he's a deadbeat dad with a history of micro-management heroism that's already cost him his wife, house and perhaps even joint-custody because he's so busy trying to solve every little crisis he passes on the street (see my term proximal morality) they never bother to notice their family standing around, embarrassed. These crazy 'heroes' run around like William Shatner with gremlins on the plane, grabbing lapels of bewildered pedestrians and blocking ambulances of overstretched EMTs. They've only ever been the villain in two movies, STRAW DOGS and THE LEGO MOVIE --and in one most people presume he's the hero and in the other he eventually sees the light. But in two 2014 TV events--THE STRAIN, the new FX show from the mind of acclaimed sci fi horror maestro Guillermo del Toro, and SHARKNADO 2: THE SECOND ONE, the Syfy original sequel far inferior to the original due to its attempt to be 'in' on its own joke--the micro-managing 'heroes' are just as if not more obnoxious than the bad guys in LEGO and STRAW, they're the good guys from the get-go. Are we being led to root against a humanity that prefers to let itself be destroyed rather than heed the squawks of these unbearable Chicken Littles?
First, Der Strain: NYC health officer Dr. Ephraim Goodweather (Corey Stoll) refuses to listen to his superiors when dealing with a vampire plague-infested plane that lands in JFK. Most passengers dead, four survivors anxious to get home and start spreading the 'news.' Meanwhile a savvy old Jew pawnbroker tries to advise Dr. Goodweather because he alone stopped the last plague with his magic sword cane, but old Ephraim ain't listening. The man's arrested for having the sword in an airport terminal, though last I heard that's not illegal. Still, right off the bat he's pretty much useless, unable to stop the plague unwilling to stop trying.
Meanwhile the bad guys (led by Thomas Eichorst, left) are fairly cool. For one thing they honor their deals, pay in cash, do their research, spends more time and money than Tootsie on make-up to make himself presentable every morning and his urge to see the world end is genuine, indicative of being turned on by the forthcoming apocalypse. Hell, I can't imagine how, planet custodianship-wise, they could do any worse than us!
Goodweather disagrees, or rather hasn't thought that far ahead, being obligated by his little taste of power as CDC agent, even to the point of ignoring the edicts of his superiors to back down, but while inviting himself to tromp all over the rights of others he also attempts to juggle into his busy schedule a hearing over joint custody for his 'yawn' little son, though he proves his wife right by always being late to court and treating his son like a special needs first grader. There's a word for this type of guy, Munchausen by-proxy, or rather, as I call them, 'dads of great adventure'. They can't admit their insecurity and ambivalence about their roles as second class citizen in the modern family unit (where mother has the power and father is little more than an older brother/manservant constantly found wanting by the privileged mother-son pair bond).
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| Naked white/grey monsters are always played by limber dancers |
Meanwhile there's this idiot woman who's husband is infected and he's barking at her to run, their dog's blood dripping from his mouth and she just stands there like a moron, frozen in 'terror' well within striking range of his forked tongue. He's telling her to run and we're screaming at the screen for her to run and she just stands there as if waiting for a cue until we wonder how she ever lived past the second episode. But then the next scene she's burying the dog and after the neighbor complains because he still hears growling she pushes him into the shed to feed her husband so we're back into thinking she's awesome. It's that kind of show, and typical of del Toro, for every corny Mexican soap moment there's two kickass touches.
Last year, The Asylum (the offshoot of Concord which was the 80s version of New World, i.e. 70s Roger Corman) gave us the surprise meme hit SHARKNADO (see: Wronger than the Storm). Now we got the the sequel, bound for much tweeting and therefore of great interest to fading actors in need of being seen by the young 'constant-texter' generation lest they fade away entirely. Thus, every middle aged B-lister realizes it's the ideal spot to cameo their new chewed-up faces and bloated bodies and thus stand a better chance of being recognized at next year's Comic-Con. Aye, matey, to trod bravely before the green screen curtain and be eaten in style knowing for sure your every flubbed line will become 'classic' in the annals of camp, a hundred winky tweets for every line spoken!
But there's the rub, for in courting cult camp what crap may come.
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| Chicken Little of the Sea |
I know our cops have problems with quick response in certain neighborhoods but not, my friends, in midtown. It's suspicious. No one is attacked unless seen first by Fin as he races past, clocking them for b-list celeb status (included in his posse: Vivica Fox, Kelly Osbourne, Judd Hirsch, Judah Friedlander, Biz Markie, Downtown Julie Brown, Billy Rae Cyrus, Rachel True, Andy Dick, Mark McGrath), at which time they're either devoured by a passing shark, or nearly so and thus join his parade. Once they are within a certain radius of the man, their lives are in jeopardy unless they follow him like children following Mighty Joe Young out of the burning orphanage, while Matt Lauer, Kelly Ripa, and Al Roker look on from the TV screen, rolling with the sharknado concept as a fact barely worth an eyebrow raise. Just avoid making seal-like movements and you're safe. But Fin is nothing if not a seal.
His rescuing-addiction was perfect for LA in the original because he had to protect the valuable clientele of his beachfront bar, and it's at a beachfront bar, we can imagine, that the notion of a sharknado first developed in some slashed screenwriter's mind. Who amongst us hasn't drunk deep from a sandy beer after a long day body surfing and imagined how badass it would be if sharks came through the window with a huge wave and started chasing people around the pool table, or swam in the air, or that the rec room floor was water so you had to jump from couch to couch. That bar owner Fin was an ex-lifeguard gave him an excuse for his chronic rescuing, and as a deadbeat dad his desire to rescue his family was offset by the forward momentum and the Hawksian sense of real time forward momentum, stretching the action across L.A. from the beach to the hills, over the course of one well-modulated real time wave of inland momentum. Since his party came from a bar it made sense they were armed and brave, and so the vibe in the getaway car was like one of those great drunken parties wherein everyone at the bar becomes instant tribe and marches off to some second location to go skinny dipping or mount a keg party. There's the drunken regular (John Heard), and Fin's barmaid, Nova (Cassandra Scerbo - above left) who has the hots for him, plus his wingman Jaason Simmons, racing with the inward tide of a gigantic wave rolling in first through the bar windows, and then up the hill, filling the streets and stalled highway traffic with sharks and flotsam, leading to exit ramp winch rescues, and various members of his party being eaten, such as his daughter's douche bag boyfriend (and there was much rejoicing) as the shark water fills living rooms but leaves driveways merely damp as if from a distant rain machine. And a slightly busted by L.A. sun and time and too much make-up clogging the pores, Tara Reid, as the embittered ex-wife who still has some vague torch for old Fin - setting up a weird comedy of remarriage).
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In short, SHARKNADO had a lot of things going for it, as a Corman film it conjured up the good old days of movies like ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS, or CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA. In short, it turned its budgetary limits into an assett, which SHARKNADO 2's NYC location simply will not permit. A tornado is practically impossible in a dense grid of skyscrapers anyway, and the sense that in L.A. no one is really "home" is and forever will be lacking in NYC's overcrowded milieu. New York is too real, too concrete, there's no time for grandstanding or defying gravity. Without the Hollywood vibe enhancing the CGI phoniness, this sequel is less like a surprise so-bad-it's-great entry amid a deluge of crappy CGI monster-bad weather hybrids and more a 'too aware everyone is tweeting about me' shitshow, as prefab and empty as a string of commercials for Shark Week during a Jay and Silent Bob film edited for content and watched on TNT by a mid-life crisis-having divorcee pothead after coming home alone from lunch at the Wal-Mart parking lot Hooters. Are we kids or what?
But we still have the original and the great untold shark story present in Tara Reid's weary face as the wife who steps back in, leaving the far more interesting Nova out of the sequel. There's no escaping her as she recovers in the hospital while Fin runs around building bombs and leaving suspicious packages, and hers, as well as most of the cast in the sequel, provides the real scary story, one of transformation and horror: a hundred young and glowing b-list actors went into the sun twenty years ago and came out looking like bad taxidermy. Botox and collagen took the rest. Anyway, they delivered the bomb.
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In short, SHARKNADO had a lot of things going for it, as a Corman film it conjured up the good old days of movies like ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS, or CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA. In short, it turned its budgetary limits into an assett, which SHARKNADO 2's NYC location simply will not permit. A tornado is practically impossible in a dense grid of skyscrapers anyway, and the sense that in L.A. no one is really "home" is and forever will be lacking in NYC's overcrowded milieu. New York is too real, too concrete, there's no time for grandstanding or defying gravity. Without the Hollywood vibe enhancing the CGI phoniness, this sequel is less like a surprise so-bad-it's-great entry amid a deluge of crappy CGI monster-bad weather hybrids and more a 'too aware everyone is tweeting about me' shitshow, as prefab and empty as a string of commercials for Shark Week during a Jay and Silent Bob film edited for content and watched on TNT by a mid-life crisis-having divorcee pothead after coming home alone from lunch at the Wal-Mart parking lot Hooters. Are we kids or what?
But we still have the original and the great untold shark story present in Tara Reid's weary face as the wife who steps back in, leaving the far more interesting Nova out of the sequel. There's no escaping her as she recovers in the hospital while Fin runs around building bombs and leaving suspicious packages, and hers, as well as most of the cast in the sequel, provides the real scary story, one of transformation and horror: a hundred young and glowing b-list actors went into the sun twenty years ago and came out looking like bad taxidermy. Botox and collagen took the rest. Anyway, they delivered the bomb.
