Across the pond in the US, everyone who is anyone – not to mention those aspiring to be someone – on Twitter is gearing up to savage a film that’s been designed to flail about in the movie ocean, doing everything that it can to become a social-media event. Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! debuts on the SyFy channel this evening, before receiving a global televisual release akin to a Game of Thrones season finale, washing up on our shores, bloated in knowing self-congratulatory pride, ready to explode. 

It’s hard not to sound like a joyless grump, like a partially warm-blooded great white waitingng to tear some poor defenceless aquatic creature apart, when casting an angry eye towards the only vehicle keeping Tara Reid in the pop-culture sphere, but don’t be fooled by Sharknado’s so-bad-it’s-good illusion; in the great pantheon of schlock cinema, where film nerds and stoners gathered in ramshackle cinemas at midnight to soak in the perverse pleasure of watching The Room, Troll 2 or Fatal Deviation - the single greatest county Meath-based martial-arts erotic drama ever committed to celluloid - Sharknado sticks out like a sore dorsal fin, purposefully designed to be bad. 

Tara Reid as a one-armed saw-wielding 'Rosie the Riveter' in Sharknado 3 promotional art [Facebook]

There can be no denying that this franchise, made on a shoestring budget, has won a place in the cultural conversation. When the sequel dropped from the sky like the deadly fish in the movie last summer, #Sharknado2TheSecondOne (in all its deadpan glory) was the top trending thing on Twitter. Legions of celebrity fans were live tweeting along, gasping in comic honour as former Beverly Hills 90210 star Ian Ziering pulls Tara Reid’s mangled bitten-off forearm from a shark’s stomach to retrieve her ring so he can propose on bended knee. 

This is trash, but trash that gives everyone a chance to say the funniest thing on Twitter, so we lap it up. 

There isn’t anything wrong with actively seeking out schlock cinema every once in a while; Pauline Kael, one of the foremost cinema critics ever to emerge from the US, described the value of sitting down with a turkey basting on the screen in front of your eyes in her now iconic essay Trash, Art, and the Movies. “Trash has given us a taste for art,” Kael writes, telling us that it’s fine to watch rubbish for the sake of easy entertainment, because in doing so we’ll eventually seek out something better. 

Sharknado 3 is not that better thing we’re hungering for having devoured the previous two, regardless of how deliciously silly the plot sounds. 

Once again directed by Anthony C Ferrante, from a script penned by Thunder Levin, who wrote the other two, as well as the impossible-to-ignore IMDb credit Mutant Vampire Zombies from the ‘Hood!, this threequel transports the action from California and New York to Washington DC and Universal Orlando, the theme park in Florida. Storm winds send scores of poorly rendered CGI carnivorous fish across the East Coast (dubbed the “Feast Coast” by popular US weatherman Al Roker), where they crush and kill countless civilians and cameo-ing celebs – C- and D-list stars for whom a minimum of 20,000 Twitter followers was the main casting criteria, according to a SyFy executive in 2014.

Sharrrrrrrrrrk!! People of London Help my Brother has been eaten!! #Sharknado3 pic.twitter.com/csx7yaICvq

— JEDWARD (@planetjedward) July 22, 2015

There will be blood, wooden performances, a much-touted Jedward cameo, increasingly self-aware satire, and actually very little to enjoy when it comes down to it. All the fun will be taking place on Twitter, where SyFy will be hoping that it can engineer lightning to strike thrice – the first movie earned about 5,000 tweets per minute, while the second tallied nearly 600,000 by the time Ziering popped the shark's stomach to pop the question. 

When Sharknado aired to poorer-than-average ratings for a SyFy original movie on July 11th, 2013, only to rise from the ashes as a Twitter phoenix beyond compare, movie lovers with a taste for rubbish smelled a rat. On Flavorwire, writer Jason Bailey wrote that the film was bad news for people love cult failures: "For those of us with a genuine love for bad movies, who seek out treasures of terribleness," he argued, "the Sharknado social-media storm was kind of like when everybody discovered rap music via Vanilla Ice.”

The problem lies in how Sharknado so desperately wants you to laugh along with it, missing the earnest purity of a truly terrible so-bad-it's-good classic. Fatal Deviation, in which James Bennett is warned to take a dive in the Bealtaine Martial Arts Tournament with the Damoclean threat of “Loose or die” scrawled on a scroll, wasn’t supposed to be bad. Its cult status as arguably the worst Irish movie ever made exists because the people involved, including Boyzone’s Mikey Graham, clearly got involved under the promise of producing something good. It’s the gaping vacuum that comes between that artistic vision and the creative disaster on screen that makes that flawed flick so endearing. 

Anthony C. Ferrante arrives at SyFy's Sharknado 3 party at Hotel Solamar on Friday, July 10, 2015 in San Diego, CA (Photo: Tonya Wise/Invision/AF)

The real danger with Sharknado 3 is the whipped-up frenzy and hype it will undoubtedly generate online. When Hollywood executives, not known for championing creativity at the expense of a better box office, sense the drops of Twitter blood in the ocean, they won’t be long zeroing in for the kill. If you’re a cold-blooded producer swimming around a cash-strapped industry, a cultural phenomenon like Sharknado, with its marketing being done for it by fans, starring cheap washed-up names that appeal to our sense of nostalgia, helmed by a nameless director from a hastily put together series of puns on a screenplay, pasted over with  bargain-basement special effects, it’s easy money. The Asylum, the studio that produces it, has never lost money on a movie, and Sharknado was a huge success at Cannes – not at the film festival, but the media one, where it sold to countless foreign markets eager to take home a surefire hit.

And if one Hollywood machine can chug out a self-determined critical failure that turns a quick profit, the others won’t be far behind. Irony will have a lot to answer for. 

So spare a thought if, tomorrow night, you get pulled into the British and Irish premiere of Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! Twitter will be baiting you, after all. But if you bite into the trash on show, you won’t be chewing your way to something more camp and silly, you’ll be green lighting Sharknado 4. 

Updated:

Will April make it to 'Nado number 4? YOU DECIDE! VOTE now using #AprilLives OR #AprilDies! #Sharknado3 pic.twitter.com/4vU8sIrCxR

— Sharknado (@SharknadoSyfy) July 23, 2015