Sharknado. A simple "portmanteau" - two words combined together to make one. The two words in this case were most likely "shark" and "tornado," which make-up two of mother nature's deadliest weapons in her arsenal of terrors, thrown together to spawn an idea for an incredibly creative original film. A film that could only be produced by The Asylum, of course. If you're not familiar with the The Asylum, they're the studio behind some of the most of the popular low-budget creature-features of recent times: 2-Headed Shark Attack, Mega Shark vs. Gatoroid and Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus... you're beginning to see a pattern emerge, right? But The Asylum doesn't exclusively make movies using the formula "shark plus other thing equals
arggggh!" Like any other studio, The Asylum has to make movies with mainstream appeal to finance their artsy, more personal films like Sharknado. And that's where another portmanteau comes in: "Mockbuster." Essentially, Mockbusters are cheap yet delightful knock-offs of Hollywood tentpole films that haven't come out yet. The Asylum can write, shoot and edit an entire Mockbuster in a shockingly short amount of time, and since they're dirt cheap to make, these straight-to-DVD fugazis bring in a great many greenbacks (that's archaic for cash money dollars). Here's just a few: Transmorphers, The Day The Earth Stopped, Snakes On A Train, Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies, and most recently, Atlantic Rim. There's been a lot of talk lately about this summer being "The Summer of Flop," and how big-budget movies might become a thing of the past, and that Steven Spielberg might be an IRL pre-cog. There's more than a few movies that have come out in the past year that have been ripe for the Asylum's picking. And in a few cases, some of these mockbusters might have turned out better than their Hollywood counterparts... So in honor of Sharknado now streaming on Netflix, and the release of the first poster for the sequel ("Sharknado 2: The Second One), let's take a look at some of this summer's movies that could have been plussed up with some of The Asylum's low-budget campy magic...