Sharknado: Everything that’s wrong with society in one made-up word

Sharknado. Or perhaps we should write it, #Sharknado.

If you have zero idea what a sharknado is, count yourself lucky and click away, dear reader — click away and save your very soul.

Still here? OK…

“Sharknado” is, assuming you don’t already know and are a weird, masochistic glutton for cultural punishment, a SyFy channel original movie in which, thanks to the help of a massive storm, thousands of man-eating great whites come raining down, mouths agape, upon an unsuspecting populace.

Really.

Here at DTOTW, we believe this heralds the coming of the apocalypse. When the trailer, below, premiered Twitter was, well, all a-twitter with the news. The story was covered by National Public Radio, among other respectable news outlets. Will Wheaton got into the act, as did Newark, N.J. Mayor Cory Booker.

Sharknado is a designed-to-be-bad movie featuring terrible actors — all apologies to Ms. Tara Reid, whose recent portrayal of Lady Macbeth at London’s Globe theater we heard was positively divine (not really). And yet folks — intelligent, successful, talented people (some of them, anyway) — line up to be a part of the fun.

The movie will do very well. People will tune in by the millions, knowing full well that it’s going to be unwatchable.

Now, we are not the first to suggest that filmmakers are following the “Snakes on a Plane” formula, combining two frightening things into one horrible amalgam of idiocy.

But “Snakes on a Plan” should have been the end. When, dear God, will it stop? Tarantulacane? ZombieNaziquake (in which the ground opens up to allow swarms of zombified Nazis the chance to take over San Diego)?

Now, the odd thing is, a sharknado is a real possibility. Not likely, per se, but possible. It has happened. There is, for example, a town in the Philippines that dealt with a rain of fish as recently as last year. Hell, there’s a burg in Honduras that has an annual festival devoted to fish-rain.

And, lo, the people gazed toward Heaven as the rivers ran with maple syrup and fish did fly as birds, and the people knew the end was nigh.