Put on your safety gear and find cover because Sharknado 4 is on its way, this July to be exact. Stars Ian Ziering and Tara Reid return as Fin and April, and this time they’ll be joined by Gary Busey as Wilford Wexler, April’s father and a scientist at Astro-X, a company that claims to have an atmosphere stabilizing system to prevent tornadoes. Cheryl Tiegs swims into the trouble as Fin’s mother and Gil Shepard’s (David Hasselhoff) ex-wife, Raye.
Variety says the yet-untitled TV movie will be set five years after Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!, which saw hellfire rain down on the East Coast in the form of sharky-twisters. No clues yet on any plot points but writer Thunder Levin and director Anthony Ferrante are both returning.
I’d like to think that in a happier time in our country, if people were less afraid and stressed-out, we wouldn’t resort to numbing our despair in things like Sharknado. But that’s just not true. B-movies are as American as T-ball and malt liquor and have delighted audiences since the birth of the film industry. In fact they boomed into popularity in the 1930s, created to be less expensive complements to feature films that theaters could show as a double bill.
More than eighty years later we get to enjoy b-grade schlock from the comfort of our living rooms thanks to Syfy, who tested the waters (no pun intended) with a slew of monster movies and found viral success with mashups like Mansquito, Chupacabra vs. The Alamo, and a whole series of Mega Shark vs. [Insert Monster here] films. Perhaps aligned with the growing popularity of Discovery’s Shark Week, they hit pay dirt when they spit sharks out of tornados and now the film series is permanently embedded in pop culture history.
Not to everyone’s delight:
Other casting for the new film includes Tommy Davidson as Aston Reynolds in what sounds like a thinly veiled parody of Elon Musk, a playboy tech billionaire and CEO of Astro-X. Cody Linley will play Matt, Fin and April’s son who has finished flight school and joined the Army, Ryan Newman will return as their daughter Claudia. Supporting cast includes Imani Hakim as Gabrielle, Matt’s friend and fellow soldier; and Masiela Lusha as Fin’s cousin Gemini. And of course, there will be cameos galore.
Sharknado 4 will also feature the outcome of #AprilDies or #AprilLives, the Twitter campaign which allowed viewers to vote on the fate of Reid’s character in the last film.