Main cast: Ian Ziering (Hunter Shaw), Chikashi Linzbichler (Sheriff Kameo Akoni), Shelton Jolivette (Ray McCray), Cheree Cassidy (Kenzie Wright), Tatum Chiniquy (Samantha Wright), Teodora Dick (Taani Akoni), Lincoln Bevers (Blaine), Eliza Matengu D’Souza (Jada), Will Jay (Dag), and Natasha Hardegen (Connie)
Director: Anthony C Ferrante

The people behind Zombie Tidal Wave are the same ones behind the Sharknado franchise, and they hope this one will launch a similarly long-lived franchise. However, this one—which is an entirely new thing and has nothing to do with Sharknado aside from having the same lead actor—lacks any sense of absurdity, irony, or novelty that made people watched those movies despite their better judgment.

While that one has an admittedly bizarre yet ingenious idea of sharks in a tornado, this one has… people in cheap blue make-up slowly wandering out of the sea.

Basically, there is a ship that, once upon a time, was sunk to eliminate the people on board, folks that are subjects of a hushed up biological experiment. Well, those Zombies are now making their way to the shore, and saving the day are the usual cast of Syfy stereotypes—the action hero, his ex-wife, the daughter, the mayor, the sheriff… Folks that have watched enough of these Syfy shows will know immediately what these words represent, as they have just swapped out CGI monsters and giant spiders with zombies.

I know I will have problems with this thing when it opens with the usual idiot couple swimming in the ocean and one of them getting mauled by the giant shark piranha sharkranha zombie. The remaining idiot whimpers for “somebody” to help—I don’t know whom she thinks will help, maybe the sidekicks from The Little Mermaid, I guess—and then a zombie clearly stands up from behind her for a sneak assault. They are supposed to be swimming miles away from shore, so is that zombie 20 feet tall to be able to stand up like that?

The zombies are extras wearing the most basic blue make-up like one would typically see on a kid’s face during Halloween when Mom and Dad are too busy or drunk to properly do things right, but there can’t be that many extras either, as the same zombie in a scene is often replicated over and over in that same scene, so that I can a whole scene full of zombies moving and behaving in exactly the same manner. The person that did the CGI during post-production must have really hated their job and the people that hired them.

Also, why are the zombies all in perplexingly dry and clean clothes? Some of them were devoured by other zombies and late rise up as zombies themselves, so did they stop for a while to launder their clothes, maybe as some kind of ritual to mark their new lives as zombies?

The acting is abysmal, barely rising above “Look, I know how to read score cards!” tier, but what really makes me cringe super hard is Shelton Jolivette’s Ray character. He’s every negative stereotype of a black man rolled into one: cowardly, nearly entirely useless, and talks all the time without saying anything of substance.

Everything about Ray, from his constant shouting to his body language, is exaggerated in a farcical manner even in scenes where such exaggerations are grossly inappropriate. For example, when he’s bringing his badly wounded niece to the doctor, he isn’t asking them to help her quickly. No, he’s babbling about how he can’t be blamed for what has happened to her. This character belongs to a parody of a monster movie, and he ruins every scene he is in. Sadly, he is in this movie for way too long.

One more thing: the zombies here are the slow, shambling variety, so I will always wonder how they can ever catch up with anything. I don’t know how no one can hear or even smell them coming. Then again, the humans run slowly even when they are supposedly being in pursuit by zombies, their expressions reflecting boredom and some degree of constipation instead of something more appropriate like fear. What is happening? Was the budget so low that catering had to be done away with and the cast were all too weak to run as a result?

Also, for an entity like Syfy that tries super hard to virtue signal, it amuses me that this movie carefully has a cast of all races and skin color, but only the white characters survive. It’s as if these people wanted to tell me that, okay, these white people have been allies and champions for so long, in time like a zombie apocalypse, these non-white people should be grateful to die so that these good white people can live.

Anyway, this movie is an absolute joyless mess. The story is the same old, same old Syfy crap, the characters are all unlikable in their various shades of dumb, and the CGI is a hot mess. There is no playful sense of humor to make things bearable either, as the humor comes almost entirely from Ray acting like the worst stereotypical black man character ever. There is zero redeeming factor here, so don’t watch it. Just don’t!

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