Director/Producer – Tyler James, Photography – Vince Knight, Music – James Cox, Visual Effects – Luma Pixels. Production Company – Dark Abyss Productions.
Derek Miller (Matt), Danielle Scott (Pamela Rousey), Jase Rivers (Clive Delaney), Chloe Karr (Lara), May Kelly (Pepper), Lila Lasso (Tina), Michael S. Siegel (Grady), Adam Rojko Vega (Travis Love), Graham Miller (Don), Nick Adamson (Flloyd), Hannah Pauley (Karen)
The city is threatened by a freak tornado that carries with it a menagerie of sharks, crocodiles, snakes, octopi and prehistoric creatures that have been dredged up from the abyss. Matt is a scientist who understands what is going on but he is dismissed and shoved out of a car by his colleague Travis. At a nearby hotel, the CIA agent Pamela has led two other girls from various law enforcement agencies as they sneak in disguised as prostitutes to arrest wanted fugitive Clive Delaney. The hotel is suddenly attacked by the creatures from the tornado. Matt seeks refuge there just as the manager Don locks the doors. Creatures still manage to sneak in and attack the guests as Matt tries to get out the codes that will allow the military to stop the tornado.
Monsternado was the fourth film for Tyler James, often written as Tyler-James, although not on the credits here. James/Tyler-James had previously co-directed Deadly Waters (2015), Dinosaur Prison (2023) and The Loch Ness Horror (2023). In addition, James has also produced a number of low-budget genre films for prolific British director/producer Scott Jeffrey. Some accounts around the web say that Tyler James is a pseudonym for Jeffrey and frequent collaborator Rhys Frake-Waterfield, best known of recent as the people behind Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023), while the cast line-up certainly features a number of actors familiar to Jeffrey’s films.
After Sharknado (2013) became a bad movie hit, there were a sporadic number of other ‘-nado’ films – Clownado (2019), Arachnado (2020), Firenado (2022). Monsternado goes the next logical step and has a tornado of all the monsters combined – sharks, crocodiles, giant octopi, dinosaurs, even killer plants. There is not a lot of justification for what is going on except a steal of the idea of Pacific Rim (2013) with some talk about a rift opened up under the ocean.
Monsternado is a film struggling to be a B-budget epic while operating with a budget considerably less than that. All of it has been shot on location – in the Nhow Hotel in London, where most of the cast valiantly try to give the impression with their accents that it is taking place somewhere in the USA.
There is a certain amusement to the film in watching to see what type of creature turns up next. However, the effects range between the passable and pitiful. The biggest issue is that there is a mismatch between the shots of buildings and the opticals of the flying sharks etc surrounding the monsternado meaning that in some shots we get animals that seem much larger than the buildings and streets they are in. There are some really terrible opticals in the scenes with Derek Miller and Chloe Karr being strangled by a tentacle and of the giant octopus scaling the tower at the climax.
The production is poor. The cast are adequate in their roles but when you have CIA agents who spend the entire film wandering around in lingerie and stilettos or the hotel’s janitor who suddenly reveals he is a former Guantanamo torturer the film’s scanty believability soon evaporates. Derek Miller spouts some nonsensical babble that somehow requires Nick Adamson to sit on the roof of a car in a flooded street tapping on a laptop as sharks prowl around nearby. And other such credulity straining contrivances. At least in the Sharknado sequels, the filmmakers threw any kind of believability to the wind and had nobody pretending to even take what was going on seriously.
(Winner in this site’s Worst Films of 2023 list).
Trailer here