Review: Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus
Director: Jack Perez (as Ace Hannah)
Year: 2009
Country: USA
This review contains spoilers. Like it fucking matters.
Internet buzz is a powerful yet dangerous thing. It gives the film in question a tremendous amount of publicity, allowing it to reach a much wider audience; conversely it also places a horrible burden on the film to outdo all the expectations the internet buzz has produced. Remember the failure of Snakes on a Plane to achieve a level of success comparable to the excessive amount of praise heaped upon it based solely on a trailer and a Samuel L. Jackson one-liner? While the film has garnered the status of minor cult classic, it was, in short, a total failure when viewed within the context of the internet buzz that preceded it. All it really did was simultaneously revive and kill the career of Julianna Margulies, who somehow got hotter as she got older.
When I first heard of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, I was intrigued not because I thought it was going to be a good movie, but because the idea of a CGI megalodon and oversized cephalopod duking it out for an hour or so sounds better than anything I have ever seen or heard of in the history of ever. A few months after hearing about it, I finally saw the trailer and, like the rest of the clueless masses, began salivating uncontrollably. The buzz became so great it even got a mention on Yahoo! News, and while not that big of a deal is still pretty impressive for a studio whose productions consist of mostly low-budget direct-to-DVD rip offs of other contemporary popular films. As a result, instead of waiting for the DVD release and because I’m not a total sucker, I queued up the bad boy and less than a few hours later I had it sitting on my hard drive waiting to be devoured. Last night I sat down and began watching what I hoped was to be an epic tour de force, the mother of all giant animal disaster movies starring washed up 80s pop singers and a soap opera actor who I seriously thought ODed from snorting blow off a hooker’s ass in a hotel in Tucson. Or at least hoped that’s what had happened. It would be fitting end for someone who once starred in a show called Renegade.
Fired for stealing the submersible, MacNeil and her former professor Lamar Sanders, who possesses one of the most cliched and offensive Irish accents I have ever heard, begin to unravel the mystery behind it all. Joined by Japanese scientist Dr. Sheiji Shimada, they embark on a quest filled with intrigue, sex, and Lorenzo Lamas. Lamas plays Allan Baxter, a government official/commando/tough guy who forces the trio to come up with a solution to end the threats, as torpedoes, machine guns, and indigestion caused by a jumbo jet don’t seem to have any effect on a super shark. The octopus is just sorta there until the end, causing damage only to oil rigs and airplanes. Clearly not as big a threat as a bridge-eating shark. Yeah, it ate the Golden Gate Bridge, too. Bitch be hungry. It don’t care. It does what it wants. ‘Cause it’s a fucking shark.
After a montage of questionable science and disappointment, a post-coital conversation between MacNeil and Shimada leads to the stunning realization that pheromones are the key. By luring them into the same waters loaded with these pheromones, they hope to force them to continue their epic battle for prehistoric supremacy. or have sex. Either one would have been cool. Now armed with a plan, a submarine, and the help of the trusty Japanese, they begin their quest to make the ocean safe once again. And the skies. And the bridges. After throwing everything they have at the shark, Mr. ‘Pus shows up and begins to go all crazy go nuts on Mr. Shark. It’s touch and guy for awhile, with ol’ ‘pus getting the upper hand until Mr. Shark bites off one of its tentacles and continues its quest to eat as many submarines as possible. Narrowly escaping in a small submersible before the whole thing gets bitten in half, our intrepid heroes manage to not only save the Japanese sub from becoming octopus food, but manage to lure the shark close enough to the octopus so they can resume the fight that should have ended the moment they were unfrozen.
So who is the victor?
Sadly, this picture is not entirely accurate. In the both ended up sinking into the abyss, presumably to reconcile their differences and play checkers.
I can’t tell if starring in an Asylum film is a surefire way to kill your career or revive it. People seem to be praising Debbie Gibson for her acting performance, and one reviewer went so far as to cite her performance as a silver lining among the stolid acting of Vic Chao and the…well, I wouldn’t call it acting, but whatever it is Lorenzo Lamas was doing throughout the film. Sadly it wasn’t dying; but he’s a veteran actor of soap operas and a few other Asylum productions, so he’s being dead inside for awhile.
We want her to succeed, even as she’s marveling at faked greenscreen imagery. We need her optimism and poise, since the men around her are too busy tossing around testosterone to care about compassion or careful planning.
But she didn’t get naked, so who cares?
The film was misleading. The titular conflict took up a mere ten to fifteen minutes of film, the majority of which was terrible CGI and the same shot of the shark swimming toward the camera and the same close up of the octopus’s eye looking angry. The entire film gave off the impression of the writer doing everything in his power to speed up the process to the aquatic free-for-all and he still managed to fail. I call shenanigans!
I’m aware the pseudonymous director wanted the movie to be taken with a grain of salt; The Asylum isn’t exactly known for producing stunning cinematic features. Yet given the amount of publicity this film has been receiving on the intertubes and the totally bitchin’ movie poster, I expected something just above abortion but below epic diarrhea. Instead we’re given the cinematic equivalent of diarrhea coming out of your mouth.
Yeah, it’s so bad it leaves the taste of poo in your mouth. Still want to watch it?
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Well that’s unfortunate. If not entirely surprising.
No sir, I do not want to watch it.
As far as bad monster movies go, this largely fulfils the criteria. As far as badly written monster movies go… the script fits, although that is the only thing it does adequately. Tiny Juggernaut, who I belive were responsible for the CG effects, actually did quite well; one can only assume that the financial backers of this dreck collectively dredged their pockets on the way to paying these buggers, because there are perhaps four or five individual scenes at best throughout the entire affair.
And it is actually patronisingly insulting: had they simply spliced and recycled the CG footage, that I could have lived with; instead, we are treated to a tour-de-farce where, to increase mileage in this chuggy old Ford of a flick, they stoop to y-axis flipping/reversing it. Shark wiggles backside enthusiatically from the left, shark coquettishly whips tail from the right. Shark bites off octopus tentacle, reused material from earlier displays a fully-tendrilled cephalopod gently caressing the same shark, whose bottom-shaking antics have not abated from before.
And as the mental image of a pole-dancing uber-Jaws assails me relentlessly, there needs must be mention made of the “colour of science” scene, which, we are expected to not doubt, is the way in which pheromones are expertly concocted… although the only con-cock-tion going on was f’r-her-moans.
*wink-wink, nudge-nudge*
The constant recycling made me sit up and take notice, if only for the fact that it became painful, seeing the same “bridge” used not only in two consecutive, dribblingly-brained captained battleships, but also in the Japanese submarine; startlingly, none of the generic light-twinkling machines had been moved, so First Mate Redshirt (US) pretended to look busy in exactly the same spot as Science Officer Redshirt (Jap.). And why was that one Japanese fellow so terminally incomprehensible? I understand their location, but quantifying as Sub-human is a tad too convenient.
It would be redundant to lament the prevalence of CG in such movies or elsewhere, because the arguments are as unchanged as the content: cheap flick, cheap FX. What DOES bear mentioning, as a final comment, is that this is merely one of the latest in an endless line of examples AGAINST movies built around those types of effects.
If only they made movies that fulfilled potential, Hollywood might not be such an insulting descriptor.
That freaking crap looks effing retarded. I went searching for reviews because my friend showed me the trailer on YouTube yesterday and he is begging me to watch it with him so that we can make fun of it. This is what useful Hollywood dollars are wasted on. This type of shit being pushed out by lazy ass teams of morons that have extra money to throw around and decide they want to get famous is how I knew the Writer’s Strike was over. There is almost no effort in movie making anymore. Every once in a while some genius might bludgeon an Independent writer into selling a script and that is where we get thought provoking films, with symbolism, more than one level of interest, generally with a moral or something that the viewer can walk away with. But as soon as mother-effers start getting paid, mother-effers stop giving a shit. “Hey! Lets string together the Top 12 Okay-est Movies of the Decade, fill a few plot holes with a couple of one-liners like ‘thank god they invented the blankity blank here in the future,’ throw some tits in there, excessive blood, we’ll hire the cheapest CGI team from one of these underfunded highschools, and we’ll pull a cool mill sending it straight to DVD.” Eff story, Eff acting, Eff continuity, Eff reason, common sense, and moderation; I’m going to go watch Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.
Hi, Have you seen Splice Movie yet? How would rate this movie?