Tara Reid jumps the shark — again — in her fourth ‘Sharknado’ adventure

Tara Reid’s chums deserve a lot of the credit — or is it blame? — for her becoming the leading lady of Sharknado.

Syfy’s wonderfully stupid film franchise about shark-infested storm systems took its first big bite out of the Nielsen ratings in the summer of 2013. Now Reid is back in her fourth outing as scrappy April Wexler in Sharknado: The 4th Awakens, premiering at 7 p.m. Sunday.

Also back is Ian Ziering as Fin Shepard, the man who’s always ready with a plan (and his trusty chain saw) whenever sinister Sharknados darken our skies.

Reid vividly remembers her reaction to the first “Sharknado” script and describing the premise to her friends.

“When I read the first one and went out to dinner that night with my friends, I was telling them the script was hilarious,” Reid says. “I was like, ‘Sharks are flying in Beverly Hills and maiming people. They’re jumping out of pools and jumping through windows and stained-glass doors. They’re everywhere.’

“My friends were laughing so hard. They were like, ‘Are you kidding me? This is amazing. You have to do this. It’s so funny. You have to do it.’ So the next day I called my agent and said, ‘All right. Let’s do it,’ never knowing it would become the phenomenon that it did.”

Social media turned Sharknado from what should have been just another goofy B-movie-caliber Syfy creature feature into a hit. On the night that it premiered, the buzz on Twitter reached a peak of 5,000 tweets per minute — and people started tuning in to see what the fuss was about.

While the premiere brought in a mere 1.4 million viewers, Syfy re-aired it a week later and got 1.9 million. A week after that, another encore broadcast racked up 2.1 million — and a franchise was born.

“Social media is what took us to the next level,” Reid says. “It kind of exploded, to a worldwide level that we weren’t expecting.”

The follow-up movies, Sharknado 2: The Second One took a bite out of the Big Apple, bringing in 3.9 million viewers; last year’s Sharknado 3: Oh, Hell No! laid waste to Washington, D.C., and Cape Canaveral and had 2.8 million viewers.

“We definitely didn’t know it was going to become what happened,” Reid says. “We had no clue that this would be this phenomenon. So it was a kind of shocking experience that turned into something wonderful. To be part of the franchise has been incredible.”

In The 4th Awakens, which is set five years after the East Coast attack of Sharknado 3, a wave of dangerous superstorms come breezing into Las Vegas.

For a time, it was touch and go, at least in theory, whether Reid would return. The third movie ended with our blood-soaked heroine about to get squished by a giant hunk of space debris and a “Will April Live?” cliffhanger.

Fans were invited to determine her fate via online voting.

In June, Syfy released a movie trailer revealing that April not only will survive, but will come back more formidable than ever, with what appears to be superhuman strength.

Also returning from Sharknado 3 are David Hasselhoff as Gil Shepard, Fin’s heroic astronaut dad, whom we last saw stranded in space, and Ryan Newman as Claudia, Fin and April’s oft-imperiled daughter.

New cast members include Gary Busey (as April’s father, a leading scientist in the field of robotics), Tommy Davidson (as a playboy tech billionaire and owner of Astro-X, developer of an energy system that can stabilize the atmosphere), Cody Linley (as Fin and April’s eldest son, Matt), Masiela Lusha (as Fin’s resourceful cousin), Imani Haskim (as Matt’s best friend) and Cheryl Tiegs (as Fin’s mom).

Almost every scene, meanwhile, features campy celebrity cameos. The familiar faces include Duane Chapman (aka Dog the Bounty Hunter) as a chainsaw dealer, the Chippendales Dancers (an inside joke, given that Ziering is a former Chippendale), former Baywatch lifeguards Gena Lee Nolin and Alexandra Paul (as scientists) and Robert Herjavec (of Shark Tank … get it?), also as a scientist.

These celebs are essentially chum in the water, as most won’t make it to the final credits.

One of the keys to Sharknado’s popularity is that Ziering, the former Beverly Hills, 90210 star, and the rest of the gang parade through the ridiculous B-movie jump-the-shark plots without letting on for a moment that they’re in on the joke.

“It is a comedy because it’s so silly,” Reid says. “You can’t take it serious when it’s sharks flying in the sky. But even though the situation seems so crazy, you have to play it serious. If you don’t, if we play it laughing the whole time, then the storyline wouldn’t make sense.

“It’s by taking it serious in such an absurd, crazy environment — that’s where the jokes come in, that’s where it gets funny.”

This story was originally published July 30, 2016 at 8:42 AM with the headline "Tara Reid jumps the shark — again — in her fourth ‘Sharknado’ adventure."