A while back, I blogged about the wonderfully terrible movie Sharknado and how I actually admired the craftsmanship that went into making a movie that absolutely farted in the general direction of what a movie is supposed to be.

Shortly after that, as we watched Sharknado 2: The Second One, I made more notes about how deliberately wrong the whole thing was, and that word processing document has remained open and unsaved on my laptop for over five years. Until now.

After saving Los Angeles in the first movie, our heroes Fin (yes really) and April have to save New York City. That’s all you need to know.

Like the first movie, this one simply ignores physics:

• Standing atop some vehicle, Fin (Ian Ziering) slices through a one-ton shark as it flies overhead; he registers not even the trace of an impact.
• Skye (Vivica Fox) slices through a giant shark (they’re all giant sharks) with a sword, again with little to no effort.
• the Statue of Liberty’s head is struck by lightning and somehow gets from Ellis Island to … somewhere in Manhattan, where it rolls unimpeded and without apparent friction or damage on and on down the street (up the hill!).
• How these sharknadoes, awesome as they may be, are able to (selectively) flood Manhattan is never examined.

Shitty camera work (deliberate, of course):

• Our cast flees on CitiBikes, and the  camera keeps giving us shots of the tires, not of the actual (unflooded and dry) streets they’re fleeing through.
• There’s a scene where our intrepid gang is fleeing up a flooded street, in which
  • Fin flings the rope, but there is no shot of it being secured
  • There are closeups of characters swinging over, and then low-angle, waist-up shots of them landed and reaching out for the next swinger, but no establishing shot to show where they’re swinging to — and the aerial of the cab in the water indicates that directly ahead of the cab is… the rest of the flooded street…

Situational danger:

• Our heroes are in a flooding staircase (with sharks), but once they break into THE FIRE ESCAPE KENNETH (because a fireproof stairwell in a 65-story hotel is… what exactly?) and get to street level, it’s dry.
• The location, direction, and speed of the various sharknadoes changes constantly.
• Fin and his gang have their own personal cab that can do a Bullitt through the streets of Manhattan, but April and her crew have to hoof it from Battery Park to somewhere around 26th Street/5th Ave. This is after we’ve been shown scenes of a tidal bore (?) sweeping up the island.
• Hurry, Fin, you only have eight minutes—who then takes another five minutes to have heartfelt discussions with his gang and make a St. Crispin’s Day speech atop a fire engine before somehow making it another dozen blocks to the Empire State Building and all the way up to the observation deck.

Again, no official governmental response:

• We finally see a canopy tent some first responders have set up, and the Mayor OF NEW YORK CITY delivers a heartfelt statement of support for Fin, the ONLY PERSON who can jury rig the “freon tanks” on top of the ESB to explode and “freeze” the sharknadoes. Which of course he does.

This is merely a drop in the bucket ocean of hysterically wrong moments in this movie. I wholeheartedly urge you to start with the first one and then watch the entire series with guilty, oh-so-guilty pleasure. I may have to have a rewatch myself. I could use the laughs.