"A tornado with teeth"

At least I wasn't alone.  On Thursday night, the SyFy channel kicked ass over all its digital competitors and gave the terrestrial channels a run for their money, when 3.9 million people watched Sharknado 2: The Second One.  This was one of those events where word of mouth was crucial to the success of the enterprise.  Though vaguely aware of the first Sharknado when it got a limited cinema release, it was only when an office colleague started talking about shlocky-horror movies, citing the original in this category.  This was ramped up by my occasional watching of SyFy to reacquaint myself with Star Trek: The Next Generation where amongst the adverts was the UK premiere of Sharknado 2 being proudly proclaimed.  Ironically, I watched the original on the Challenge channel but it gave me four days breathing space between that and the sequel on 31st July.
Like The Expendables franchise, the second Sharknado was a lot more knowing, not going to the post-modern extent of Scream, but certainly in the Snakes on a Plane league.  Indeed, part of the attraction was a massive internet buzz - Snakes...  had a competition asking people to send in lines Samuel L. Jackson could say with the winning entry making an appearance in the film; the Sharknado team went one step further, presenting a list of ridiculous titles for voting: Sharknado 2: The Second One, right down to its redundant clause (which technically implies a remake of the sequel), won out.
Finlay 'Fin' Shepard (a name with yuk-yuk laughs all over it), played by Ian Ziering, returns as does his sometime estranged ex-wife April Wexler, given the Tara Reid treatment (I bet Reid loves this second, late flowering of her career).  Everyone else is new to the audience, making it unknown who will get chomped.  There are a range of cameos: Andy Dick, Kelly Osbourne, Billy Ray Cyrus (thus, in this one instance, outshining anything his daughter had done).  Wil Wheaton shows that, contrary to his appearances in The big Bang Theory, he can hold down a role in a 'bad' movie; along with his wife Anne he is uncredited but he comes to a suitably gory end (in a way that many Star Trek fans wished would have happened to his TNG incarnation), which I think should give rise to the line "Wil Wheaton gets eaten."  There was a Robert de Niro-alike portraying a New York taxi driver but sadly it was not the great man himself (though this would represent a step up from much of his recent fare).
All the conventions of such a film are observed: the preservation/restoration of the nuclear family (any threat ruthlessly destroyed); the rallying speech before the finale, the tension between former best buddies, inexplicable plot developments.  The last one includes: Fin knowing how to lower the landing gear of a Boeing 747 without any external help; April smiling at the sight of an ambulance and turning up in a fire truck; and a shark being impaled on the lighting rod of the Empire State Building somehow managing to fall to the balcony below.  It all adds to the sense of chaotic fun.
There are tributes to Cloverfield with the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty landing in downtown Manhattan and The Evil Dead (II and III) with April's buzzsaw for a hand.  It's not essential to have seen the original but it does help marginally - the aforementioned kebabed shark having escaped in the first one after being scarred with a bookcase being thrown on top of it.  There is also a little pathos rather than gung-ho action nonsense without time for grieving, as Fin at the start of the sequel explains how he can't be happy when he lost two friends and contributed to the trashing of Los Angeles.  Telling the same thing to the New York mayor and how his heroic efforts weren't appreciated in LA, the mayor responds, "This is the Big Apple.  When we get bitten, we bite back!"  Such regret makes Sharknado 2 slightly better than the first one (which was gloriously silly in its own right).  We also have the return of the iconic chainsaw weapon.  And the action scenes are better scripted - the opening airline sequence; the escape from the stadium; the subway flooding (an alligator attacks a waterworks official before being attacked by a shark, followed up by a wholesale crunching of the end of a subway train); flaming sharks landing everywhere after an abortive attempt to stop one waterspout; Fin riding his nemesis shark using nothing more than a chain.  And there are plenty of others
We are apprised of the makers' thought processes when it's mentioned that fish occasionally get sucked up into weather systems - the guys behind Sharknado just scaled it up and with super-intelligent, super-agile sharks to boot.  As is the fad these days, there is a post-credits sequence, where Fin finally gets to tuck into the New York pizza he wanted at the start of the film - more coherent than that of many cinematic releases.  The question will be: where will be the next Sharknado - London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mumbai?