Jaws Open, Monster Storm Hits East Coast

The only way to get through an East Coast sharknado is to savor the excess. So many sharks. So many cameos. So much promotional ballyhoo.

Yes, 'Sharknado 2: The Second One' arrives on Wednesday night on Syfy, and this time the great whites are raining down on the Great White Way. Actually, who knows what species the precipitating sharks are, and quite a lot of the mayhem takes place in Queens, but judging from the advance coverage (' 'Sharknado 2' Ready to Take Bite Out of Big Apple') it's illegal to write about this movie without making a bad pun, so I wanted to get that out of the way early.

Anyway, if you have inexplicably missed the mania, here is how we arrived at this moment. A year ago we were plodding through a relatively ordinary television summer until July 11, when Syfy, a niche cable channel whose programming normally has no effect on anything, broadcast 'Sharknado' and rocked the world. The gist of that deliberately cheesy movie: Sharks sucked up into the atmosphere by tornadoes start falling on Los Angeles, and they're kind of angry, and a guy named Fin (Ian Ziering) saves the day with a chain saw.

Something about 'Sharknado' made people crazy, and the movie became the cult phenomenon of that summer and beyond. Naturally, there would be a sequel, and, of course, the shark storm this time would be visited upon New York.

Syfy, an NBCUniversal property, has been promoting 'Sharknado 2' relentlessly, and who can blame it? If you're a secondary cable channel and have a chance to distinguish yourself from the scores of others, you'd better take it.

The underlying philosophy, with the promotion and the film itself, seems to have been that when you have a movie about a shark rainstorm, there's no such thing as overkill. That's almost true. 'Sharknado 2' intends to be nothing more than dumb fun, and it succeeds well enough at that. But it also leaves you regretting that the 'Sharknado' team (Anthony C. Ferrante again directed from a script by Thunder Levin) didn't reach for camp greatness.

As the movie opens, Fin and his ex-wife, April (Tara Reid), are flying into Kennedy International Airport to promote a book about the 2013 sharknado when the plane passes through a sharknado of its own, to disastrous effect. And, yes, for those keeping track, that is the second unpleasant TV landing at Kennedy this summer. The planeload of dead passengers that began 'The Strain' on FX also touched down there.

Fin tries to warn New York about the coming storm. New York doesn't listen. And then comes an outlandish, chaotic collection of scenes featuring sharks on subways, sharks on skyscrapers, sharks on city streets. A Mets game in Queens is a particular focus.

The movie is full of recognizable stars in small roles, and since spotting them is one of its main pleasures, they won't be identified here except to say that the pilot of that plane has been a pilot before, and the cabby who gets Fin to the ballpark has a fair amount of experience.

Unfortunately, the movie doesn't really do anything truly memorable with all these guests, as if just getting these actors to show up were enough. That's largely true of the sharks as well.

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