After a disappointing fourth chapter, can Sharknado 5: Global Swarming redeem the franchise? Let’s find out!
(My brother and I used to walk past this dingy tobacco storefront “Smoke Shop” in Manhattan, but the sign had pipes instead of esses. Every time, one of us would point and say, “Pipe-moke pipe-hop.” This movie is Five-harknado, and I shan’t call it anything else.)
We open with Nova–she who, at the end of the last film, rode in(?)… on(?) the Eiffel Tower to Niagara Falls. Dressed in biker gang leather, she rappels into a cave, folds her map a la Romancing the Stone to find the spot she’s looking for, and analyzes a bunch of shark hieroglyphs on the walls. She radios her colleagues. What do you need?, they ask. “Fin Shepherd.”
Well, he’s in London with his wife April and young son Gill. (Tara Reid’s eyeliner is soooo thick and her lips are soooo pink and her hair is soooo blond and she is on soooo many beta blockers.) They’re meeting with Chris Katan, a British liaison to NATO? Or something? Nonetheless, Fin helicopters to Stonehenge to meet Nova. She points at the cave art. “Sharknados have happened before,” she says. Ah, this fits the right-wing swing these films have taken. It’s not climate change causing our problems; this is all within the arc of geologic history.
Back in London, Chris Katan tips the top hat of a Winston Churchill bust to reveal a button that opens a doorway to MI6. There, Clay Aiken, doing a surprisingly great British accent, shows off pen-bombs and whatnot, just like Q in the James Bond universe. He gives these technologies to April and Gill, who as far as I remember do not use any of them. Chekhov’s pen-bomb, people!!
In the cave underneath Stonehenge, Nova and Fin do some Indiana Jones shit with boobytraps and counterweights, and the cave floods really fast but also slow enough for them to run out and climb ropes up the cliff. They jump into the helicopter as Stonehenge gets blown to smithereens by a storm with a purple laser in the middle! It sucks the chopper up–oh no!
The UK’s version of Hoda Kotb reports solemnly on the news, and her lower teeth are all misaligned, and I love real-people teeth. Everybody quit with the fucking veneers already.
April, you’ll remember, is part robot so she catches Fin’s helicopter, which has been spitted out… in London! The purple laser storm? It’s a portal! Keep that in your back pocket.
Chris Katan’s leg gets eaten, and Nova drives a double-decker bus with Bret Michaels rocking out on the front, before the London Eye gets blown off its axle. April uses her rocket shoes to fly up and stop it from hitting something I can’t remember. Fin jumps on a shark and rides it bucking-bronco style into Buckingham Palace where he meets Queen Charo, and cue the opening credits! This gets me every time! I said to the guys, “But we’ve been here for hours!”
Gill gets sucked up into a purple laser storm, but his parents are unruffled. “We’ll get him back,” Fin says. You might think him overly optimistic, but remember: His dad, David Hasselhoff, was rescued after chilling on the moon by himself for a couple weeks, and April gave birth inside a shark, so Fin has reason to keep his chin up.
Then Geraldo Rivera pilots a dirigible, and I’d like to restate my previous claim that these movies were written using Mad Libs.
Robo-April spins with a ski above her head to make a tornado to fight the sharknado.
They dogsled into it and–hey look, Gill’s flying around up there!, but they can’t catch him before the storm dumps them in the ocean in Australia (portal, remember?). Tony Hawk skateboards on top of the Sydney Opera House…
Me: “I missed a plot point.”
Dave: “Plot?”
Olivia Newton John, in what can only be described as a mixed-mesh outfit and violent purple lipstick, fixes April by removing and replacing the entire lower half of her body. She’s like an unhoused hermit crab there on the table for a sec. Not only does ONJ patch her up–she gives her a full 1980s makeover that would have blown my 12-year-old mind: hot pink streaked Shih Tzu hair, tight black pants, gloves, gingham(!) bustier(!), and hot pink fur jacket. She looks, and I cannot state this strongly enough, ridiculous.
Me: “Guys, I need help with an analogy. [Blank] have more sexual chemistry than Ian Zering and Tara Reid.”
Matt: “Two cotton balls fucking. I heard that on a podcast.”
Dave: “Me and my boyfriend pillow.”
The lovebirds get sucked into the portal again and end up in Brazil, and Tara Reid’s pants are saggy in the crotch because she’s so skinny. Tiffany New York Pollard tells them in an Eastern European accent–maybe she’s an Estonian expat living in Rio, what do you know–that they can actually create sharknados if they have a relic that looks like a giant blue porkchop, which she does, but it gets stolen by Greg Louganis while they’re looking the other way. They chase him but get rebounded out of Christ the Redeemer’s hand into the portal, which plonks them out at the Colosseum. Despite making it to the county spelling bee in 7th grade, that is one of those words I have to look up every time–how many Ls? One S? Two? Is there really not an ‘i’ anywhere in the word? In my notes, I wrote colliseeeyum.
They meet Pope Fabio. Fin says, “Forgive me, Father, for I am Fin,” and the Couch o’ Queers has to pause the movie to catch its breath.
Nova dies dramatically, and that’s too bad because she was literally the only good actor in the whole production and her tits were gorgeous.
Fin and April’s adult son gets killed in Kansas, and the couple try to cry at each other for a minute before moving on.
They sharknado-portal to Egypt. (Guys, would you believe I’m leaving out so much because I am. I’m skipping Japan entirely, OK?) Turns out the relic can be used as a button to open a crypt that contains a sharknado-controlling machine, but I don’t know, there’s a tsunami and an explosion, and April gets blowed-up. Fin finds and cradles her head, and the eyes open, ugh.
Cut to a devastated world. Fin, carrying a bindle, seeks someone… anyone. A vehicle pulls up; Dolph Lundgren emerges. “Dad!” he says to Fin. Get this: Gill survived the purple laser storm and made the Egyptian sharknado-controlling machine into a time machine. Now he’s back from the future.
Was it good? Of course not! Was it better than 4? 100%.