Sharknado makes us ask if we're even still afraid of sharks

I recently spent a lazy rainy day at the Lake of Ozarks skipping out on a boat ride in exchange for a triple header of Shark Week movies on the Syfy Channel, the only one of which whose name I remember was Trailer Park Shark.



I guess it just goes to show that I, like many others, will watch anything that includes great whites. There's no telling whether that hillbilly jam was better or worse than the grand dame of the new breed of shark movies, 2013's Sharknado.

I finally got around to seeing that alleged classic last night and, despite an obvious decrease in brain cells reported in my head today, the movie is an indelible must-watch for fans of the 90s classic TV show Beverly Hills 90210. Ian Ziering, aka Steve Sanders in Bev 9er, finally found the one role he was always meant to play, as Fin, the surfer dude whose beach bar is destroyed by waves of sharks. He then goes about crossing Los Angeles to drop bombs on tornados and vanquish the flying sharks with his chainsaw.

Really, does any more need to be said?

3 out of 5 stars. Now I have, what, four more Sharknado movies to catch up on?

Best Magazine Reads: 10 Great Nuggets About Heathers

Heathers is one of my all-time favorite movies. I didn’t include it in my recent 60 Funniest Movies Ever, but it would no doubt be #1 in a similar list of dark comedies. It was released in 1989 to slim audiences but built a huge following through home release.

And the cult still grows. Here are the 10 most interesting nuggets from Entertainment Weekly’s recent oral history entitled The Original Mean Girls.

1. Winona Ryder, whether or not she would have played protagonist Veronica Sawyer, absolutely loves Heathers. She said she’s seen it probably 50 times and can recite every line. She calls it “great literature.”
2. The original ending was that Christian Slater’s J.D. would blow up the school and there would have been a prom with all the students in heaven. Studio execs wouldn’t allow it.
3. A “pimply-faced” Brad Pitt auditioned and was not cast, but he told the writer his script was brilliant.
4. Jennifer Connelly and Justine Bateman both rejected the role of Veronica, even though they were the choices ahead of Ryder.
5. The crew had to retrieve Slater a couple of times because he overslept during filming. He told them he had a sleep disorder.
6. Slater says Shannen Doherty didn’t seem to have any interest in him during filming, so he just stayed away from her.
7. Ryder says she was a virgin during the time the movie was filming.
8. With her conservative upbringing, Doherty had some problems with the acidic language and swearing. Ryder grants her that she had just, after all, come off her role on the 100 percent innocent Little House on the Prairie.
9. After asking “did you have a brain tumor for breakfast?” in the movie, Kim Walker, who played lead Heather Heather Chandler, died of brain cancer at age 32 in 2001.
10. The new TV network Fox was starting up and execs there chose between two scripts – a Heathers TV show or Beverly Hills High. We all know what they choose, and what they renamed it.

Mutant Hillbillies Not Weird Enough to Carry The Hills Have Eyes 2

I enjoyed The Hills Have Eyes because I'm a sucker for any horror movie about mutant hillbilly types.

So I decided to dig into 2007's The Hills Have Eyes 2. It's OK, but it's essentially the exact same story, so it loses quite a few style and originality points.

Instead of a family getting lost in the backwoods, this one features a group of mutants living in mines at a military test base and several soldiers seeking answers to a series of mysterious disappearances in the New Mexico hills that look a lot like Pakistan or Afghanistan. I suppose there's something profound intended based on our never-ending series of Mideast wars.

One hint at the low-rent level of this movie is that one of the stars (spoiler alert!) who survives is Jessica Stroup, now relatively famous as Erin Silver from 90210 (an awful show, which I watched for all of its too-many seasons).

This movie is a far cry from Wes Craven's top work (he is credited as a writer) such as his 1977 version of The Hills Have Eyes, Scream, and Swamp Thing.

My biggest beef is that the mutants have no backstory. I would have liked to see a lot more of them.

**1/2 out of ***** stars

Where'd You Go, Bernadette is Only Half Fun

I thought I would love this book, having been authored by Maria Semple of Arrested Development, Saturday Night Live, and Beverly Hills 90210 writing fame.

And indeed I did voraciously suck in the first half, but the second half left me cold with a boredom-inducing adventure through the Antarctic to locate the Bernadette from the title of Where'd You Go, Bernadette.

Many pop-culture landmarks are touched upon, with Bernadette Fox having won a Genius Award in her youth before settling in as an unemployed and cynical private-school parent (or more like a friend) to daughter Bee and cold-fish wife to Microsoft fellow-genius Elgie Branch.

Elgie is on the verge of getting Bernadette institutionalized while he is half-heartedly carrying out an affair with his co-worker. But then Bernadette disappears. The novel is a decent study in family dysfunction. And the characters are fairly memorable, but they are also almost roundly unlikable.

Maria Semple

I was kind of bummed I had spent so much time with these kooks. This one is, unfortunately, no I Love You, Beth Cooper.

*** out of ***** stars