I was shocked watching SHARKNADO 3, which premiered with much Shark Week-esque hooplah on Syfy last week, when one of the "live tweets" mentioned "the theme park worker," and not the Universal Orlando Theme Park worker, which is really doing your promotional tie-in guy wrong. Meanwhile a commercial commemorates one of the recently eaten Secret Service guys, saluting him for being free at last from his wearisome cellular contract. Hey, that's clever, taking a chummy cue from Shark Week's many tie-ins over on Discovery, a fine example of synergy and vertical integration offset by the ultra-dated cliche'd black expression "Oh hell No" white people are now so crazy about. Can using words like "clutch," and "baller" be far behind, yo? "The new ill sausage and baller bacon butter triple hog dare ya from Applebees - baller. Simply baller." or "Patron Blue Tequila - Clutch... simply clutch."
From the latest Corman offshoot company joint Asylum, wherein they realized they had a great high concept so decided to spend a little more money and do it better than the usual wretchedness, SHARKNADO the First delivered the same kitschy but rock solid vehicles with which Corman had been powering drive-ins across the country all through the 70s and late night cable all through the 80s, and VHS rentals all through the 90s, and brought it even to Syfy, for whom it marks a new self-aware camp crap golden age where if you don't mind crappy CGI and all the breasts staying in their bikinis, it's a feast indeed. And sometimes, I'll confess I don't mind. It's like BAYWATCH for monster movie lovers to fall asleep to on a lazy Sunday. You know, instead of going to church or playing Nintendo.
Nor do I take umbrage with clever ad men tying in on this shark wrangle, because the tie-ins become closer and closer to the actual movie until the two are tangled as two fishing lines hooked into the same two-headed shark's mouths. The result makes for quite a spectacle, wherein your own psyche is a direct participant, like watching America eat itself always is, even as it eats you from the toes up, until all that's left is your finger on the remote hand. We see it all over the net, and on NBC's Saturday Night Live, which does Amex commercials in the same manner as their satiric commercial sketches, making the two impossible to separate. In other words, vertical integration is no mere Jack Donaughey 30 ROCK joke. Check out this Clickhole ad's deadpan mix of satire and straight forward advertising... where does one end and the other begin? Exactly - that difference is long gone.
Nor do I take umbrage with clever ad men tying in on this shark wrangle, because the tie-ins become closer and closer to the actual movie until the two are tangled as two fishing lines hooked into the same two-headed shark's mouths. The result makes for quite a spectacle, wherein your own psyche is a direct participant, like watching America eat itself always is, even as it eats you from the toes up, until all that's left is your finger on the remote hand. We see it all over the net, and on NBC's Saturday Night Live, which does Amex commercials in the same manner as their satiric commercial sketches, making the two impossible to separate. In other words, vertical integration is no mere Jack Donaughey 30 ROCK joke. Check out this Clickhole ad's deadpan mix of satire and straight forward advertising... where does one end and the other begin? Exactly - that difference is long gone.
That's why the second SHARKNADO was so painful: it had become fully self-aware and was just camping it up, shitshow-style, featuring a string of bloated once-familiar faces hoping to up their Twitter numbers up as they're eaten near NYC landmarks and Fin's hero complex looking dangerously close to terrorism (See Micro-Manager Munchausen). This third go-round though, despite the douche-chilled "Oh HELL No!" tag, makes it back to something like the first film, which worked so well because it wasn't just the tornado that was interesting, but the incoming tidal surge that flooded the drainage sewers and left the water line climbing up into the Hollywood Hills. The tornado didn't even come along until the final act. It was much better that way, the onrushing flood and coastal environment, the way the whole first 2/3 was one long inward motion from the first bites out in the water, to the bar, the hurricane coming ever closer, the surge of water right as Fin's closing up, the fleeing inland to the car, and then up to the Hills to try and rescue the family. The tornado didn't come along until after all of that, and instead we had sharks in swimming pools and sliding down the highway strips. No one but me remembers that. Time marches on, and the flood was probably harder to animate digitally than just having airborne sharks. And this tie-in bonanza is once-in-a-lifetime. I'm sure none of the subsequent airings will have those same ads, and it's a damn shame.
But hey, Bo Derek is great, she's eternal like "She Who Must Be Obeyed" as Tara Reid's mom, both of them dragging now designated sharknado expert Fin to Orlando instead of into the thick of the tornado or helping the president prepare for the oncoming tide of inexplicable sharks. Reid's quite pregnant, their oldest son has "deployed" so isn't around and their cute daughter Claudia (Aubrey Peebles) is played by a different actress with dark hair (Ryan Newman), a subject of much small talk. Now Fin and his family are public figures, America's designated sharknado solvers, with the Oval Office quick pass. Fin doesn't like that Cassie Scerbo as Nova spent the sequel off on her own, going all storm chaser Mad Maxine in an armored shark investigation camper with radar, arsenal, and contingency plan (Frankie Muniz is her lovelorn tech guy --you always got to have a little tech guy in your crew, usually named Mouse or Jesse). Once again, she steals the show giving a great raspy voice Jersey girl realness even to her manic obsessive psychospeak and when she says that when she crawled out of the shark in the climax of the first film "it's never been the same." Scerbo, you are the heart and sou of these films and never let them tell you different! You're love for Fin, who only had eyes for his family, was the great unusual propellor that drove the first film's boat. Not having it around in the second made it fairly trite --is there anything more unseemly than some Cali broheim lecturing us on what it means to be New Yorkers as he runs hither and yon chasing his family around like a confused maniac terrorist-tourist hybrid? You weren't there, so the only interesting aspect left was Tara Reid having her hand bit off and replaced with a bionic arm. A part I do not remember.
I don't even mind that Fin's still got the obsessive hero complex, because it fits as part of a subtextual army recruitment ad, and even further-around-the-curve NRA promotion. When gun nuts take the law into their own hands to save their neighborhoods from flying sharks, we all benefit, but especially the psycho likes of Michelle Bachman and Ann Coulter, both of whom make cameos. And of course NASCAR and military build-up...UFC fighter Josh Barnett blasts sharks for the military--now more than ever. In the ads, Race Car Driver #3 uses being eaten by a shark to escape his cellular contract. Cosmetics in real killer colors; the incessant car insurance barrage "I guess they don't like you driving around on three wheels." And the smug girl chiding her husband with her good driving record cash back; the new Jeep Cherokee; and the M. Night movie about creepy grandparents; Pepsi; and local ads for: the Honda Summer Clearance Event; Broadway superstars of Magic "The Illusionists" and The Book of Mormon. Promos for Syfy's own latest hop-on, "Lavalantula" which will hopefully involve leaping from the couch to the stairs and floating around on the mattress; an miniseries CHILDHOOD'S END, about an alien invasion that brings happiness and peace but what's the downside? What are these peacenik aliens really up to? "I would rather the world go down in flames under our control than live in prosperity and peace under their's!" we hear someone shout. Spoken like a true Republican! "Messing with Sasquatch" promotes rude near-bullying taunts of Bigfoots in the name of jerky; turkey and guacamole (flavored substance) from Subway; Captain Obvious at Hotels.com ("They won't judge your life choices"); some guy with an unbearably pandering sensitive voiceover, the kind so common now, where they talk to you like you're five years-old and just skinned your knee:"All you need to see is the next 200 feet, that's how life unfolds - and you'll get there. (1) Fuck that. The badass anti-smoking ad equates a cigarette with a vicious science class monster with smoking, and that's so clutch. Anything that kills you makes you cool first. If Bogie's life taught as anything it's that real men don't do longevity.
Subtextual pro-NRA ultra Neoconservative Army recruitment tool or no, Tara Reid give birth while falling through the earth's atmosphere inside a giant flaming shark, Fin cutting a whole in the shark so a parachute can get through as they plummet safely down to Earth, us seeing Fin from inside the shark through the holes burning up its thick hide as it falls down through? Priceless. Even Tara Reid's skin looks much better. And Nova, welcome back. I just hope they wise up and give you your own shark fighting series, because you're worth it.
CHOPPING MALL (1986) on the other hand, came to me free of all commercials, liens and tie-ins, and seeing it for the first time after the NAD 3 was very satisfying. Why had I waited until now? The poster alone (at left) kept me away back in 1986- it looked like a cheap slasher film, which by 1986 was tired as shit, and it seemed gratuitously gruesome and a downer. Some bloated mentally challenged mall cashier with a metal hand starts chopping up and eating the long pig, I figured. I was wrong. I found out last week that it's a Julie Corman produced joint about security robots run amok, going up against three young furniture store clerks and their dates meet at the furniture store for a night of passion and drinking, for sex as a teen in the 80s wasn't something you could easily do with parents home, so you needed to get creative (especially if, like me, you've never really figured out sex in the car). It's Wynorski's directorial debut and he'd go on to much worse things but he has been busy, and he's always better than he needs to be, even his work in the pre-NADO Syfy-Asylum monster hybrid schlocker PIRHANACONDA (2012) but here he's on his "A" B-game. He gives it his all, and gives the film real inexorable fun momentum, all while ladling on the in-jokes: "Peckinpah's" gun store delivers the Romero mall arsenal; the nerd shows his blind date ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS while the non-virgin couples get it on in other areas of the furniture store; there's also a Dr. Carrington and a whole slab of dialogue verbatim from the original THING; one character tries to dispel robot attention by saying "klaatu barada nikto;" Corman company posters adorn the pizza shop walls; Mary Woronov and Paul Blartel are store owners who roll their eyes at the robot debut ceremony (with plenty of ROBOCOP allusions); and Corman regular Dick Miller is a cranky custodian. Now that's entertainment! 
Best of all, all the teens may be generally horny, but are resourceful, relatively likable, and brave. They eschew the seven stages of grief (as seen in THE MIST) and go right to the savagery switchpoint. Even the designated strapping jock type Mike (John Terlesky) has a certain amount of good-natured charisma, and the blind date's a crack shot (Kelli Maroney, who was in the excellent NIGHT OF THE COMET--which I did see in the theater) and the sexy older girl an ace mechanic (Karrie Emerson). Rather than sobs, they make bombs with cans of gas. Barbara Crampton (YOU'RE NEXT) makes it almost to the end, and isn't afraid to toss a pipe bomb. The robots are badass, real remote controlled little maniacs on tank treads, with Gort eyes ("klaatu, barada, nikto") and Robocop-style platitudes ("Have a nice day"), lasers shooting out of their eyes (not in the original design) put there along with their evil intentions by a freak storm ala GOG--which Wynorski credits for the robot concept in the extras. And in the end they are what make the movie truly a classic. Wynorski's using really interesting fully automated robots rather than just CGI or guys in cheap robot suits. Plus, malls are a great place to set horror movies, I can only imagine seeing it at a theater inside the mall where it was filmed. Then you walk out and bam, you're right there, same stores, fountain, etc. Baby, that's my kinda meta.
But hey, Wynorski's currently working on something called SHARKANSAS WOMEN'S PRISON MASSACRE. Now that the Corman-Asylum-Syfy brand has the shark CGI in the hard drive, you bet we'll see those air sharks once again. Dominique Swain and Traci Lords will star. I will certainly watch it, maybe... probably not. But I'll watch CHOPPING MALL, aka KILLBOTS again. For it is a TERMINATOR rip that cares, that does it's own thing and branches out to riff on other films besides just being a bore or trite or tawdry.
I have nothing against rip-offs, because film is a living evolving myth, and when one myth strikes a cord, when it reverberates out into a huge imagination-firing, inspiring hit, every hack and B-movie auteur starts thinking about how they would do it slightly different. The cat is out of the bag. JAWS launched a whole genre, then ALIEN, then ROAD WARRIOR and then TERMINATOR. CHOPPING MALL gets the latter while evoking the DAWN OF THE DEAD suburbanite amok consumerist fantasy of running amok in the mall, getting whatever you want, without paying.... so clutch.
Goofy but sufficiently deadpan horror movies like SHOPPING MALL and SHARKNADO tap into this need for the kill, but in the process expose the utter ridiculousness of this need in our consumerist fantasia society. When we have everything we need, we have to create our own artificial calamities, and every step of the way through them, the advertising dogs our heels. And so it comes that even the tools of consumerism have their demons, the shark eating you is financially obligated to remind you about the new Applebee's shrimp platter, and the security robot trying to kill you is only trying to protect that ultimate consumerism signifier, the mall. And if the vertical integration continues as it has, soon, even horror movies won't feel safe in the night, as product placement lurks waiting to devour even the most amorphous fears before they can reach us. Until then, airborne sharks and amok robots are our wicker man, our straw dog, our effigy burning at the stake. If we can cathartically tap all those repressed terrors, cathartically exercise them in a bloody shark chainsaw inside-out space ride bonfire, then--for a little while anyway--we're free from the fear that consumes us.
But we all know effigies only buy us some time. They only postpone and distract the reaper of souls coming for thee, like appetizers or the opening band. Sooner or later it will be our turn to take the stage and be devoured in fangs of flame, and all that will be left will be a pool of blood.. and guts... glory... Ram. Lease the new Ram truck today - you pay nothing before 90 days; once you're dead you automatically owe nothing. Offer void in Ohio.
NOTES:
1. My voiceover career stalled out when clients stopped wanting the deep Tom Waits rasp and moving towards that touchy feely "high" voiced food co-op nonsmoking smug sensitivity in my voice so I may be prejudiced, but fuck that namby-pamby shit.
2. I literally watched that movie last week, and at his age had the same shy boy trouble busting first moves, some say I still do. I'd show them weird old movies til they'd either get tired and leave or throw themselves at me. But that was before... the meds.