As “Sharknado” hero Fin Shepard, Ian Ziering has battled the fish-infested weather system in both LA and New York.
So is Fin getting any better at this as the third installment of the campy Syfy franchise moves the sharknado to Washington, DC, and Orlando, Fla.?
“Bombs and explosives were used to dissipate the storms in the previous two movies — there’s no bomb big enough to dissipate this storm,” Ziering tells The Post. “So you have to find something else. And they do. That’s where NASA comes in.”
Indeed “Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!” (premiering Wednesday at 9 p.m. on Syfy) filmed at Cape Canaveral (the hub of the space program) and at Universal Studios in Orlando, where Fin goes to rescue his daughter who is there on spring break. While the studio gave the production access to hi-tech sound stages, Ziering assures it maintains its B-movie feel.
“It’s still a low-budget film. You can’t expect James Cameron-level visual effects because that’s a different movie,” he says. “We don’t have thousands of background artists [extras] — we’ve got a handful. In one scene they’ll be toward the front, in the next scene they’re in the back so you don’t recognize that person just had his legs chewed off in a previous scene.”
Viewers should notice that “Sharknado 3” has a plethora of celebrity cameos, including Mark Cuban, Ann Coulter, Bo Derek, Penn Jillette and Teller, Jerry Springer, Anthony Weiner, Michele Bachmann and Jackie Collins. After the surprise success of the first movie, this time around Ziering says stars “would show up and they’d have to write in something creative just to make it happen.”
The franchise’s continued popularity (“Sharknado 2” drew nearly 4 million viewers in its premiere last July) would seem to make a fourth installment inevitable, and Ziering says he would love to continue working on the movies — perhaps next in an international setting.
“There’s a lot of shores, not just here in the United States but all over the world,” he says.
“One thing for sure is [that] Sharknados happen everywhere.”