9. Sharknado (2013)
The low-budget production company The Asylum isn’t exactly known for high art. It mostly churns out cheap copycats of previously released blockbusters like Top Gunner, Transmorphers, The Terminators, and Battle Star Wars. The films are a waste of time and money, and it’s hard to say why they even exist, but one of their original movies became an overnight sensation after airing on Syfy in 2013. In Sharknado, Tara Reid is tasked with saving Los Angeles from a tornado that, somehow, is filled with sharks. Part of the film’s charm lies in how fully it embraces being a winking send-up of the Sharksploitation genre. With sharks out of their natural ocean habitat and raining down from the sky, there’s plenty of room for colorful and outlandish deaths, and Sharknado more than delivers. It may be one of the most shallow shark movies out there, but it’s undeniably worth watching, if not only for its cultural impact.
