For centuries, man has suffered the indignity of sharknados, or storms full of sharks, occurring all around the planet. At least, that’s the dumb Transformers-level mythos being peddled by the trailer for Sharknado 5: Global Swarming, coming soon to a channel enough of you are apparently leaving on during these things to encourage Syfy to keep making them. What began as an ironically entertaining exercise in straight-faced silliness has devolved into a pandering slog of product placement, pointless cameos, and a sugar rush of ideas so poorly thought out, Herschell Gordon Lewis would go, “Hey, fellas, this needs a rewrite.” The last one sucked so bad, it couldn’t even be bothered to explain why we should suddenly give a shit about the extended family of Ian Ziering’s Finley Shepard. When a cameo by Carrot Top as an Uber driver is one of the better parts of your movie, it’s time to throw in the badly CGI’d towel.
But no, here comes Sharknado 5, with a trailer that bafflingly removes any chance to watch sharks rain down upon the earth—which, last time we checked, was the only real incentive to tune in to these garbage fests. Proudly following in the footsteps of Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, it instead assumes we care about some mystical hokum as it wends its way through a cheap-looking castle/pyramid thing full of shark statues from ye olde times, which we’re willing to bet is literally how it’s described in the script. Ziering gives a voiceover about how these storms have always happened around the globe, and then someone else says he needs to go back to where “it all began,” and then we get a shot of an exhausted-looking Ziering referencing a far better film by saying, “Why’s it always gotta be sharks?” So, yeah, despite all signs pointing to this somehow being worse than Sharknado: The 4th Awakens, we’ll nonetheless continue to hope the new one will somehow pull this dispiriting franchise out of its tailspin. These movies have jumped themselves so many times now, who knows which direction might lead back to the fun.
Sharknado 5: Global Swarming flops onto the small screen August 6 on Syfy.