The Last Sharknado: It's About Time (2018)

Fin has to go back in time to rejoin his shark-battling friends to save the future by stopping the random Sharknados that are mysteriously popping up at major historical events throughout history.

REVIEW: After five movies in five years, and a massively surprising pop culture phenomenon, it all comes down to this one last movie by The Asylum and the SyFy Channel, The Last Sharknado: It's About Time.

Much of my issues with Sharknado 6 are actually pretty much the same issues I had with Sharknado 5: Global Swarming - Most of the jokes I didn't find funny, the plot is all over the place, they throw way too much random stuff into the script just to see what sticks and most of it doesn't, the special effects (which, to be fair, have never been good to begin with) are pretty much the worst they've been in the entire franchise, and it just moves from pretty much one random action scene directly into the next with very little (or none at all, in some cases) down time between scenes for character moments. On top of that, I don't understand the logic behind why destroying the first sharknado from the original movie automatically prevents all the following sharknados from the other movies from happening, nor why sharknados are randomly popping up throughout time.

Actually, the sharknados themselves, for the most part, almost feel like more of an after-thought next to other things going on during those scenes, almost as if they forgot they were supposed to have sharknados in the movie so they just threw them in at the last minute. When it comes to the sharknados themselves, for a movie being billed as the final one, I kind of expected...more... dealing with them, especially toward the end of the movie when they waste so much precious time in the future where sharknados don't even play a role in anything going on in that stuff and the main 'villain', if you will, of the movie (and by extension the culmination of the entire franchise) switches from sharknados to...well I won't spoil it but it was definitely a bit of a let down to have this random 'new' threat be what the entire franchise has been leading up to as a final battle, of sorts.

However, with those things said, there's still a lot I actually genuinely enjoyed here as well. The opening sequence of the characters riding dinosaurs into battle against a sharknado while the Extinction Event is happening around them is quite possibly the best opening scene of any movie, of all time, logic, physics, and special effects be damned. Also, what little bit of down time we do get between action scenes is spent mostly working on Nova's character and giving her a pretty interesting and sad backstory that we never got in the other movies, which in turn also gives us Cassie Scerbo's best performances in the entire franchise. Actually, pretty much all the returning actors give top-level performances in this last hurrah, which surprised me seeing as how that was one of the things I complained about in the previous two movies. Tara Reid especially is normally the low point of all these movies when it comes to the acting, but even her I was pretty impressed with here, especially since she plays multiple different versions and variations on that character this time around.

Also, trust me when I say you will not see where this movie ends up. It gets so batshit crazy insane by the end that I was pretty damn sure someone had drugged my beer or something and I was hallucinating what was happening. Overall I didn't like the climactic scene at all, considering it's the climatic scene of the entire franchise, not just this one movie, and as mentioned above I didn't like that they threw in this brand new 'ultimate evil', so to speak, to do battle with, however props must be given for how zany and messed up and drug-induced the entire scene actually gets.

Despite my many issues listed at the top, I actually rather enjoyed this entry quite a bit. It's still nowhere near as good for me as the original three movies were, and even though it's closer in tone and style to Parts 4 and 5, neither of which I liked much, I actually had a total blast with most of this movie, though admittedly a lot of that probably stems from knowing this is the final movie and it would be the last time we get to share in this annual tradition so I was willing to just sit back, take it all in, and enjoy it without being overly nitpicky.

By the time the very end rolls around, the entire affair (and franchise as a whole) ends on such an unbelievably, genuine, heart-filled note that even if you only partially-liked the series, you'd have to be a soulless monster to not appreciate and get a little bit sentimental that it's all over with now. Through the ups and downs alike, here's to six years of the most insane, wild, and cheesy movie franchise in history.

7/10 rooms in the Psych Ward