More bait for shark lovers
Sharknado has ‘secret sauce’ actor Ian Ziering can’t explain
SHARKNADO 5: GLOBAL SWARMING
The son of Fin Shepard ( Ian Ziering) and his bionic wife April (Tara Reid) gets trapped in a travelling sharknado (a.k.a. shark tornado) and transported around the world. Our heroes trek to London, Rio, Tokyo, Rome, Amsterdam and beyond to rescue him. Cameos include Fabio as the pope, Charo as the queen of England, Chris Kattan as the prime minister of England and Olivia Newton-John as a scientist. (Space)
LIFE OF KYLIE
It’s the latest Keeping Up With the Kardashians spinoff, with a focus this time on 19-year-old Kylie Jenner. Premiering with two back-to-back episodes, the eight-part, half-hour docu-series follows Jenner as she takes on her roles as an entrepreneur, fashion designer, social-media star and head of Kylie Cosmetics. (E!)
CELEBRITY FAMILY FEUD
A new episode of the game show airs. This time, the stars competing to win cash for charity include former contestants from The Bachelor led by Wells Adams (season 12 with JoJo Fletcher) against former contestants on The Bachelorette led by Jubilee Sharpe (season 20 with Ben Higgins). In another game, author Sandra Lee and her team face actress Lea Thompson and her team. (City/ABC)
NAKED AND AFRAID
It’s the season 8 premiere, titled Lost at Sea. For the first time on the show, a divemaster and a U.S. Navy Seal become stranded at sea, facing exposure, deadly sharks and heatstroke. (Discovery)
POWER
The fourth season of this crime drama produced by 50 Cent continues with the episode You Lied to My Face. The St. Patrick family is thrust into the public eye when Ghost (Omari Hardwick) moves forward with his new business. Plus, Tasha’s (Naturi Naughton) relationship with Silver ( Brandon Victor Dixon) deepens and Dre (Rotimi) talks himself into a promotion. (Super Channel)
MEXICO CITY The memes and mockery abound, but Sharknado has conquered audiences, netted dozens of celebrity cameos such as George R.R. Martin, Ne-Yo and Kelly Osbourne, and has turned into an annual event. The fifth instalment of the TV movie series about airborne sharks arrives Sunday with new celebrities and international settings.
“As a viewer I appreciate it because it’s fun, it’s escapism, it’s pure entertainment. But how do you explain it? I don’t know,” said series star Ian Ziering, who along with Tara Reid fights a tornado of sharks with a chainsaw.
“Major motion picture studios spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to capture some of whatever it is that makes our little Sharknado movie globally popular.”
“It’s kind of like the secret sauce: No one really knows for sure. I wish I knew, I would be making my own movie,” he said with a laugh.
Sharknado: Global Swarming premieres Sunday on Space. It finds Ziering’s Fin Shepard, an expert in “sharknados,” called upon by governments around the world to fight the crazy phenomenon.
Filming took the cast and crew to Europe, Asia and Australia. This year’s cameos include Olivia Newton-John, Bret Michaels, Clay Aiken, Charo and the Mexican weather personality Yanet Garcia.
“Now that we’ve become a global movie it’s not just people who want to be in the movie, there’s countries who have solicited,” Ziering said.
“I think the craziest place that we shot that was, (where) they were looking at us like we were out of our mind would be Tokyo when we were running in the streets at night, like screaming. They don’t understand the language, and they’re looking at us and this crazy hair, and he’s got this in his hand. People were like, ‘ What the hell is going on?’ ” Reid said.
The plot has been nonsensical from the beginning and has created many memes on the web. Even Ziering found it ridiculous at the beginning.
“When I read the first Sharknado movie, I thought it was terrible. I told my wife that I couldn’t do this movie, that it would be the end of my career,” said the actor, who starred in the popular ’90s TV series Beverly Hills, 90210.
“I am an actor, but my most important job is provider of my family. I didn’t have very much confidence in the movie, but I did it anyway to provide for my family.”
The love of the fans has led to a yearly instalment since 2013, all of them directed by Anthony C. Ferrante. For Ziering, the biggest challenge has been “keeping it all together.”
“We’re saying things that are so ridiculous that sometimes you really want to laugh really hard,” he said. “But you have to take all of this really seriously, because in the context of this movie these are very serious scenarios.
At this point the only way he would stop being part of Sharknado would be “if Fin Shepard ever got eaten and is not able to chainsaw his way out of the shark.”