Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

We here at the FCU would like to take this time to personally thank The Asylum for a glorious weekend. On Saturday we watched this movie ‘Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus’ and then on Sunday we fired up the DVR to watch ‘Mega Python vs. Gatoroid’. Can a weekend get any better that? Sure it can, easily, but for arguments sake let’s just say no, it cannot. And while ‘Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus’ wasn’t very good, not quite reaching the lofty… uh… standards set forth by its predecessor ‘Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus’… after watching ‘Mega Python vs. Gatoroid’, ‘Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus’ is looking a lot like ‘Pulp Fiction’ by comparison.

Say hello to Naval Lieutenant Terry McCormick as played by Jaleel White, and at no time will we utter the words ‘Steve’ or ‘Urkel’ in this column. Damn, we just did. Dr. McCormick is a shark expert who has created hydroponic spheres to either repel or attract sharks. Challenge: Every time Dr. McCormick says the words Hydroponic Spheres drink a shot of your favorite adult beverage. If you’re not stinking drunk by the 45 minute mark of this movie you are an alcoholic and you need to seek professional help.

Terry is in love with his shipmate the Lovely Corinne (Nicola Lambo). She’s going to die and it’s going to be Mega Shark’s fault because Mega Shark likes to belly flop over Naval Destroyer’s for some reason. Everybody thought Mega Shark was dead after Debbie Gibson and them did him in back in the original film, but tragically they would be wrong and Terry swears undying revenge.

On the other side of the world there’s dirty crocodile hunter Nigel Putnam (Gary Stretch). On many occasions in this movie Gary Stretch’s character had a lot opportunities in which he could’ve taken a shower but yet he insisted on remaining filthy throughout. Nigel was hired by a very pretty lady (Hannah Cowley) to stop a beast that is interrupting the mining of blood diamonds in the Congo. In a very confusing scene Nigel faces this beast, I thought the beast ate Nigel, just like it ate the pretty lady, but the beast regurgitates Nigel, I think, and collapses. It appears that Nigel somehow sedated this monster but how he did this I can’t tell you.

Eventually Terry and Nigel, who have a sordid past, are brought together by the terminally pissed off Secret Service Agent Hutchinson (Sarah Lieving) to the Battle Destroyer of one Admiral Calvin (Robert Picardo). The task is a simple one… hunt and kill the megalodon. This simple task is complicated by the mega gator and the fact it has laid 8 billion eggs across the entire world. Now observe as Terry and Nigel jump into Agent Hutchinson’s chopper, the two men constantly bitching at each other with the trio going to a location with Terry’s hydroponic spheres that never work. Seriously, observe this because they do this over and over and over again. However in the middle of one of these many redundant trips Agent Hutchinson takes off her blazer and does not put it back on for the rest of the movie. Agent Hutchinson has been blessed. This temporarily distracted us from the redundancy of the malfunctioning hydroponic sphere trips.

Meanwhile Mega Shark and Crocosaurus are off the chain battling each other while destroying the world in the process. From SoCal to Panama to Sea World the battle rages on with the only thing that could possibly end the terror being a hydroponic sphere that actually works.

I’ll say one thing about ‘Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus’… this might be the most ambitious movie ever made. I mean these creatures went all over the world destroying everything. They destroyed Panama, they wrecked Sea World, they f’d up Miami, Malibu, Hawaii, Tankers, Submarines, cars, helicopters, fighter jets, highways, freeway, skyscrapers… the only thing that was missing was Mega Shark jumping on the Space Shuttle and destroying the moon. Which would’ve been hot by the way. That kind of oversized reptilian monster destruction action is laudable and appreciated and does a little to cover up the fact that Mega Shark liked to belly flop like Flipper and Crocosaurus tended to moonwalk when she moved over land.

There are the occasional gaps in logic here and there, say like Nigel being able to tranquilize the ginormous gator all by himself while the entire military might of the entire planet earth was helpless. Watching Jaleel White and Gary Stretch jump in and out of helicopters and whine like little girls throughout the entire movie got a little tedious after a while, and it is peculiar that the previous movie ‘Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus’ had way less action than this movie but yet seemed less boring, particularly when this movie was superior in almost every conceivable way. Better actors across the board, less crappy special effects, more monster destruction and a cast of literally thousands. Steve Urkel as a romantic action hero? Come on man, you can’t beat that with a stick. I mentioned to my lady about Jaleel and this movie and she says ‘Oh, I loved him in Black Dynamite’. That’s Michael Jai White honey, not Jaleel White. Michael Jai is awaiting your formal apology.

But despite all of these wonderful things in this movie it still turned out to be more boring and tedious than the movie it followed, a movie that was pretty damned boring and tedious at times in its own right. I guess Christopher Olen Ray just isn’t the director that ‘Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus’ director Jack Perez is. Nonetheless this is a movie in which a giant fish destroys a small nation and we wouldn’t miss that on a bet.