Peanut butter and jelly. Bogart and Bacall. Sharks and Tara Reid. Two of these duos are obvious good fits, while the other combination’s satisfaction is entirely surprising. Syfy has given audiences not just one but two Sharknado movies, and arguably no one was more surprised by the films’ unmitigated success than Reid herself, who reprised her role of April Wexler for the sequel. I recently spoke with her ahead of Sharknado 2: The Second One hitting Blu-ray and DVD – it’s out today – and the actress shared one big way in which the low-budget franchise has changed her life.
It’s like it just doesn’t stop. People love Sharknado. Everyone used to come up to me and say American Pie, or even The Big Lebowski or whatever, but people now are like, “Sharknado!”
Personally, I’d rather be known for The Big Lebowski, but then Reid is much more of a heroine in Sharknado 2 than she was as Bunny Lebowski, and is thus presumably easier to cheer for from across an L.A. street many decibels louder than the traffic passing by. I mean, she jams a circular saw into the wound where her hand used to be, and uses it to chop a shark up. All without screaming in exorbitant pain. It’s both classy and classic.
Electrical appendages aren’t the only shocking thing about Reid’s experiences with these movies. As the films created an audience largely through rampant social media buzz, the movies’ releases were quite different from your average film – even for TV movies – and on the opposite side of the galaxy from the process behind Star Wars: Episode VII, that other sharks-and-tornadoes movie. (Just a rumor.) Reid talks about the flipped schedule below.
Everything was so reversed with it. All of a sudden it became this huge hit, and then it was going to come out in theaters for one night on a Friday, and then it was even crazier. Then, all of a sudden after that, we did all the press. Normally when you do a movie, you do the press, you do the tour, and then how the movies comes out…how it does, how it doesn’t, that’s it. It’s over. And on this one, everything – even the movie – everything was backwards. There was no formula whatsoever…The second one, we did press for. It was definitely different. But, we’re still doing press for it. It came out, what, almost two months ago.”
With Sharknado 3 an eventual reality, not even the sky is the limit for where this mayhem can take Syfy audiences. Find Sharknado 2: The Second One’s Extended Version out on Blu-ray and DVD now, with special features including a filmmakers’ commentary, a making-of featurette, deleted scenes, a gag reel, and a feature on the plethora of oddball cameos sprinkled throughout the film.
