Reviewed by
Christopher Armstead
‘Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus’. Come on now, what kind of normal person could resist a title like that? I know I’m not one of those people. Toss in a trailer that’s probably the best trailer that our friends over there at The Asylum has been able to generate, sprinkle in a little Lorenzo Lamas who I think knows a thing or two about battling prehistoric beast – Raptor Island anybody? Anybody? Believe me, I understand if you choose to keep quiet on that one. And then for the cherry on top how about a little Deborah, I knew her when her when she was still Debbie, Gibson. Girl, you are still ‘only in my dreams’ forever and ever. With a pedigree such as this, said movie would have to be really, really, really bad for us to shat on it. So you can knock off two of those ‘reallys’ because ‘Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus’ is only really bad. This is a positive step forward for our heroes at The Asylum as they continue to inch forward towards their unspoken goal of creating regular crappy movies as opposed to suicide inducing crappy movies. Outstanding.
Ms. Gibson is some kind of sea scientist named Emma Macneil who has just hijacked a multi million dollar submarine to look at pretty fishes. Just so happens while she was looking at the pretty fishies the Gub-Ment was dropping ALF’s or something that I can’t rightly remember right off the coast of where she was doing her observations. Now I have no earthly idea where she was floating in this sub but there were glaciers all over the place. Note the movie takes place somewhere around San Francisco and to the best of my knowledge, which is admittedly limited, Frisco doesn’t have glacier lined coasts. Anyway this ALF thing emits a super high sonic frequency breaking up these glaciers and setting free a long frozen Megalodon and a giant octopus. Not cool.
Dateline Japan. Watch the Giant Octopus eat an oil rig. Who knew oil rigs were so tasty? This has piqued the interest of Dr. Seiji Shimada (Vic Chao), another sea scientist who wants to get the bottom of this ‘mystery’ because nobody has seen the 800 foot Octopus except one lone survivor who ‘looked into its eye’. Our third sea
scientist is Dr. Lamar Sanders (Sean Lawlor) who was Emma’s college professor. Emma and Lamar have determined that a beached whale was eaten by a giant shark, then they pick up Dr. Shimada from the airport who informs them of his giant octopus and eventually all three get Homestead Securitied out of their comfy homes and become hostages of the U.S. Gub-Ment and it’s chief of Giant Shark / Octopus attack Czar, the foul-mouthed Allan Baxter (Lamas).
To say the least we have a problem as our Shark and our Octopus are completely invincible, the Shark can freaking fly as evidenced by its penchant for leaping out of the water and eating airplanes, and if you have an F22 Lightning and you fly it too low the ground… well, you pretty much get what you got coming from that evil tentacle. So with battleship destroyers, air force jets and nuclear subs having no effect, what in the hell are we going to do? Well I don’t what you’re gonna do but Dr. Shimada and Dr. MacNeil are going to have sex. Under normal circumstances I would think there are better ways to spend ones time in the midst of such a catastrophic series of events but these are smart people screwing which ultimately leads to brilliant post coital ideas which just may save the day. How do I know they’re smart? Because all three of our sea scientist quote Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar all at the same time and that’s some shit that only smart people can do.
So don’t let anybody fool you into thinking that ‘Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus’ is anything other than a crappy movie. When taken independently as a work of cinematic art it falls short in almost every conceivable category. The CGI effects are some of the worst you’ll ever see at this point and time during the 21st century, there’s very little reason or logic in anything going on in our narrative and it does tend to get a little bit on the dull side at times. Part of this is because our scientists spend so much time mixing stuff in beakers and flasks, talking fake science talk, surfing the internet, contemplating life mysteries or quoting Julius Caesar. There wasn’t nearly enough Shark or Octopus action, and while the CGI effects were extremely suspect, I still wouldn’t have minded one bit if they had given that college kid with that copy of Blender on his I-Mac a few extra beers to churn out some more cheesy creature effects.
The thing is, however, we don’t generally judge movies from The Asylum against other movies, only against other Asylum movies and this one is one of their better ones. Chao, Gibson and Lawlor were more than up for the task of their roles trudging forward mightily, playing this thing completely straight as if it were actually written by Shakespeare. Lorenzo? Well… he looked like he knew his lines mere seconds before the scene was going to be shot and given a choice between being on set or getting a wisdom tooth pulled, I’m not too sure about which one he’d pick. On a positive note Ms. Gibson was handling the joystick on that sub like she’s actually handled something like that before. Made me a believer.
Yes, ‘Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus’ was pretty damn bad all things considered but it was much better than the last Asylum movie I saw, and that would’ve been ‘The Terminators’. And it wasn’t so bad that if they chose to make another one, as the final scene so menacingly threatened that they were about to do, I’d been near the front of the line to watch it. Just buy extra beer for your effects team is the only thing I’d suggest. Or Crown Royal. I know I do great work on Crown Royal.
