Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Zombie Tidal Wave’ on Syfy, the New Brainwaster From the Makers of ‘Sharknado’

After six films in six consecutive years, the Sharknado franchise’s creative well clearly had been exploited a mere fin’s width from overkill. So this summer, SYFY replaced it with Zombie Tidal Wave, which reunites the dynamic duo of the Sharknado series, director Anthony C. Ferrante and star Ian Ziering, who clearly are the Scorsese and DiCaprio of the prestigious SYFY Original brand. If successful — and why wouldn’t it be? — Zombie Tidal Wave will surely be followed by Zombie Volcano, Zombie Earthquake, Zombie Titanic, Zombie Global Warming, Zombie Solar Flare, Zombie Locust Swarm and Terms of Endearment 2.

ZOMBIE TIDAL WAVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Ominous public domain music. A tank of water dressed to look like the ocean floor. Some low-rent CGI. Two bathing-suited twits stand in a postcard in paradise, newly engaged. A person covered with Lee Press On Wounds and blue poster paint from Party City lunges from beneath the waves. Digital blood sprays everywhere. For some reason, it doesn’t lure in digital sharks. I mean, digital sharks like to eat weeks-dead digital whale carcasses, so why wouldn’t they want to snack on digital zombies? We’re 112 seconds into Zombie Tidal Wave, and already a cataclysmic plot hole erupts, forcing us to make excuses for it: all the sharks are in Borneo for mating season, the events of the film take place the weekend Endgame opened, the zombies already killed all the sharks — but why aren’t there any zombie sharks in the movie? Why aren’t there any zombie sharks?

Somehow, we soldier on. The plot establishes Hunter (Ian Ziering) as the hero and Dr. Kenzie Wright (Cheree Cassidy) as his would-be girlfriend and Samantha (Tatum Chiniquy) as her daughter and Ray (Shelton Jolivette) as his pal and Jada (Eliza D’Sousa) as Ray’s niece and Sheriff Akoni (Erich Chikashi Linzbichler) as the local authority and Taani (Angie Teodora Dick) as the sheriff’s daughter and Blaine (Lincoln Bevers) as a preppy douche. This is where you pause the movie, start a betting pool for who survives, and begin the Zombie Tidal Wave drinking game, the only rule for which is as follows: immediately stop drinking, turn off the TV and convert to Scientology.

Question: how does the title thing happen? Zombies emerge from a fissure at the bottom of the ocean, opened by an earthquake, which causes the tidal wave that washes all the zombies to wash ashore, hungry for flesh — I HATE when that happens. The setting is the fictional Emrys Bay, which for a while seemed to be in Schmlorida, until I realized the steering wheels were on the wrong side of the cars, so it must be someplace foreign, like the Schmilippines or Newfoundland. It’s coastal, it’s tropical, it’s the perfect place to learn that zombies still possess enough muscle memory in their virus-corroded cerebral cortexes so they can swim efficiently.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Zombie Tidal Wave blends the tropical setting and character intimacy of Huston’s unforgettable Key Largo with the dramatic intensity of J.A. Bayona’s tragic tsunami thriller The Impossible — except it replaces every instance of artful filmmaking craftsmanship with zombies, and lines like “I’ll tell you what I think they are. They’re alive, but dead.”

Performance Worth Watching: Ziering is like Michael Rapaport Lite, or maybe more like Michael Rapaport Dry or Michael Rapaport Ice. Anyway, Ziering co-wrote this movie, which is shocking because somebody actually wrote it.

Memorable Dialogue: Take your pick:

• “How? Why? I stopped carin’ about that when I saw my niece bite the head off that orderly!”
• “Let’s go kill some dead guys.”
• “Look. Dead ahead.”

And of course:

• “It’s a zombie tsunami.” No exclamation point.

Sex and Skin: None. TBSSATWAFZTF: Too busy somehow surviving a tidal wave and fighting zombies to f—.

Our Take: Should’ve called it Zombinami, SYFY. You blew it!

So, can the latest SYFY brainwaster fend off zombiennui with a blast of neo-current post-ironic pre-heat-death-of-the-universe quasi-genre prefab dreck? Eh. Sure. Why not. Let it have its few hours on Twitter — which is kind of like letting a preschooler beat you at chess. As wastes of time go, this is definitely one of ’em.

The filmmakers think they’re clever by naming the band in the movie The Fulci’s, named after Lucio Fulci, who directed 1979’s influential Zombie, in which an actual human playing a zombie swam underwater and fought an actual shark. That’s not a typo — “The Fulci’s.” Someone please murder that apostrophe with extreme prejudice. DON’T YOU THINK YOU CAN SLIP A FALSE POSSESSIVE BY ME, ZOMBIE TIDAL WAVE. Or maybe the movie’s only pretending to be stupid?

Anyway, movies were much better in the ’70s, partly because the dumb ones were just dumb instead of trying really hard to be dumb, like Zombie Tidal Wave is. These SYFY originals turn hyperbolic nine-beers-deep bar conversations into actual movies (you’d have to be wasted to even attempt to pronounce Lavalantula), which is admirable in concept. But actually sitting through such low-impact stupidity is an act to be performed only by people who are apocalyptically stoned. Motivate the fanbase of these things, and you could legalize weed for eternity and watch Little Caesars’ market share hit lightspeed.

Then again, it had me almost not thinking about Donald Trump and the looming spectre of death for 86 minutes. Tough call.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Use once and destroy — your IQ!

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Zombie Tidal Wave on SYFY