New Jersey native Ian Ziering again stars as Fin Shepard, carrying a 45-pound chain saw to take on the sharks falling out of the skies from a freak weather system over New York City.
SHARKNADO 2: THE SECOND ONE
9 tonight, Syfy
What's that up in the sky? Is it a bird? A plane? Oh, no. It's a killer shark that's dying to get its jaws on Tara Reid!
Again.
Yes, the rather redundantly titled "Sharknado 2: The Second One" — with Wyckoff's Reid and fellow New Jersey native Ian Ziering reprising their lead roles — is about to touch down once more, as Syfy attempts to, in Ziering's words, catch "lightning in a bottle" for the second summer in a row.
Last July, "Sharknado" was a freakish success, generating a whopping 5,000 tweets per minute the night it debuted and growing its viewership with each airing.
So what if many of those were making snarky comments as they watched the movie about a tornado that lifts sharks out of the ocean and deposits them in Los Angeles? A "twister with teeth," as one character calls it in the second movie. "Sharknado" was an instant pop-culture hit.
"We had no clue signing on to the film that this would be this phenomenon," Reid said during a teleconference that she, Ziering and director Anthony C. Ferrante did recently with television reporters. "It was a great and kind of shocking experience."
Syfy almost immediately ordered a sequel (and recently even announced there will be a third film).
Tonight, "Sharknado 2" arrives. It boasts celebrity cameos and even more sharks (the CGI variety), Ferrante says, with more than 700 visual effects shots. It will also be on the big screen for one night, on Aug. 21.
Same screenwriter, more fun
"It's bigger and better than the first," says screenwriter Thunder Levin, who wrote the original movie as well. "I think the fans who liked the first one are gonna love this even more, and I think the people who enjoyed ripping the first one to shreds will undoubtedly have fun doing the same thing. But I think they're gonna find themselves caught up in it, and I think they're gonna be surprised by how much they enjoy it."
Having saved Los Angeles from complete destruction in "Sharknado," Ziering's Fin Shepard and Reid's April Wexler — ex-spouses who have rekindled their romance because of their shared trauma — wind up having to rescue New York City in the sequel. Although Levin, who was "born and bred" in New York City, says that New Jersey was "spared" (at least this time), not so lucky are the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the New York subway system — and Citi Field.
"I am a diehard Yankees fan and unfortunately, we weren't able to get Yankee Stadium. I had visions of Derek Jeter playing a cameo in this and it was not to happen, but the Mets were just great," says Levin. "They went out of their way to make things work for us. We had a great day at Citi Field, even though it was perhaps the coldest I've ever been in my life."
On the late February day that they filmed at the Queens stadium — when the weather went from "bright sunshine" to snow to "torrential winds" back to sunshine — Levin says it was so cold that they had to set up heaters just off camera "to blow warm air on the actors' faces" so they could move their mouths to speak. "We were shooting a summer film in the midst of the worst winter that the East Coast has had in recent memory. That was one of our greatest challenges."
The 'Sharknado moment'
While shooting on the streets of New York City was expensive, it made "Sharknado 2" look "a lot bigger than the first one," says Levin. He wanted to give the film a distinct flavor and attitude, and so, besides the iconic landmarks, he made sure there were yellow cabs and hotdog carts and a community spirit that "you don't have in Los Angeles," Levin says. "I think that the biggest difference between the first and the second movie is that in L.A., it's sort of every man for himself, and that sort of comes across in the movie … whereas New York, when something goes wrong, people band together. 'When something bites us, we bite back' is a line in the film."
As he was writing "Sharknado 2," Levin says, the question everyone kept asking was what the "Sharknado" moment would be.
"In the first one, there's this moment at the end where [Fin] goes into the shark and cuts his way out [with a chain saw]. 'How are you gonna top that?' That's what everybody kept asking me. And my answer for a long time was, I don't know," Levin says. "I didn't want to just have him chain-saw his way out of a bigger shark, or chain-saw his way out of two sharks or a whale or whatever. I wanted to do something different but still provide sort of that 'oh, my God' moment."
Eventually, it came to him. Not that he'd spoil the fun by revealing what the new moment is. "I'm very excited for the public to see it," Levin says.
In "Sharknado 2," Fin does wield a 45-pound chain saw, but rather than swinging it through the air, Ziering said, "I'd steady it and let the sharks fly through it this time."
No comments:
Post a Comment