The Clever Badger To add insult to injury, the platypus is leading.

Movie Review: Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus

Last night, for lack of anything  better to do while waiting for the laundry to finish, I watched the destined-to-become-a-forgotten-classic Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.

And yes, I'm going to inflict a 1700 word review of it on you.  I need to in order to purge as much of the memory of this craptacular abomination from my brain as possible.

On the positive side, the movie does actually contain both a Mega Shark and a Giant Octopus.  This positive is, unfortunately, countered by the fact that it also contains both Deborah Gibson and Lorenzo Lamas.¹

Now, the setup for the film involves Gibson, in a completely believable role as an oceanographer :S cruising around under a glacier somewhere in a research sub.   Coincidentally, there's a military helicopter (conveniently disguised as a commercial 'copter, either for reasons of stealth or film budget) getting ready to drop a Sooper Seekrit sonar pod in the same area.  The sonar pod disturbs the whales (yeah, there are some whales here, too, along with coral reefs, tropical fish (!), hammerhead sharks, and a partridge in a pear tree), which start banging their heads against the underside of the glacier.  Or maybe the sonar pod is broadcasting 80's metal bands. 

Anyway, all of this whale-on-ice violence cracks open the glacier, freeing the conveniently-frozen-in-battle (damn, that ice age came out of nowhere...) titular shark and octopus.  Gibson's character (who we still don't know the name of) catches a glimpse of the beasts, but doesn't see the need to mention it to the guy in the sub with her.

Some unspecified amount of time passes and we  now find ourselves on an oil platform somewhere in the Sea of Japan.  It's night, and stormy because it's always night and stormy on oil platforms in direct-to-video films since the darkness and rain makes it easier to hide the fact that you're actually filming in an idle factory somewhere in Canada.  By clever use of the "shake the camera and have the actors stagger around like they're drunken frat boys" technique, we see that the platform has come under attack by the more tentacular of our two antagonists.  A couple of closeups of what I think are supposed to be octopus eye later, we make a jump cut to an airliner flying through a storm.  (Yep.  An airliner.  Wait - it gets better.)  Passengers are jumpy, and the flight attendant is doing her best to calm them down, when one of the passengers looks out the window to see (wait for it...) a giant shark leaping maybe 30,000 feet out of the water to bite the plane in half and drag it down into the ocean.  I kid you not.  Shark.  30,000 foot leap.  Eats plane. 

I'll fast-forward through the middle of the film:

Gibson's character, who we now learn is named Emma, investigates a whale carcass where she finds an 18 inch long section of something white and sharp.  Meanwhile a Japanese scientist, Seiji, begins investigating the oil platform incident that the Japanese government is anxious to cover up.  Emma takes the sharp thing to her supposedly Irish Ex-Submarine driver oceanography professor.  Somehow using various tests that involve pouring red liquid into test tubes and random screens of numbers flashing by on a computer screen, the figure out that it must be a Megalodon! Oh, noes!!! (Megalodon, Mega Shark.  Get it?)

The shark eats a U.S. Navy Battleship (that is misidentified as a destroyer).  I think the octopus may or may not do something in here, too.  It doesn' t really matter.  We're just supposed to realize that the shark and the octopus are doing Really Bad Things in the ocean.

At this point, for reasons that aren't entirely spelled out, Seiji shows up to work with Emma and her professor (a character who, by the way, appears to have been created with Sean Connery in mind.  As if.) and shows them some sketches based on eye-witness accounts of the oil platform disaster.  Based on these really crappy pencil sketches, they decide that the other terror of the deep must be a Giant Octopus.  At about this time, a mysterious DVD shows up, sent to Emma by her sub-mate, Vince (remember him?  I didn't think so).  The DVD contains the footage shot by the cameras on the sub.  When she views the footage, which looks like something shot with a cell phone camera (in the dark, through a sock), she immediately remembers seeing the creatures back when the whales had cracked a wobbly and were braining themselves on the ice.  Way to go with that timely recollection, Emma.²

Soldiers show up and take the trio to a Navy base (which looks suspiciously like different shots of the "oil platform" from earlier...), where Lorenzo Lamas slithers onto the screen as a sleazy racist spy or soldier or something who wants our noble group of scientists to figure out how to put a stop to the ocean going terrors that by now have brought global shipping to a standstill.   Cue more lab scenes with various test tubes and colored liquids. 

Somewhere in here, Emma and Seiji make a connection, leading to what has to be the most unenthusiastic on-screen kiss I've ever seen.  They then run off to a broom closet to, >ahem< make another connection, after which they make the connection that maybe pheromones might be the way to lure the creatures into shallow areas where they can be captured.  Or killed.  Or something.  Keeping in mind that these things are eating airplanes, Navy ships, and oil platforms, "capture" doesn't seem to be the right answer.  But that's just me.

The team brews up some shark and octopus pheromones, and sends Seiji back to Japan to deal with the octopus.³ 

This particular scheme doesn't work out well, again for reasons that aren't well explained.  We do  learn, though, that prehistoric sharks are capable of swimming at 500 knots when they're trying to catch a mini sub driven by Deborah Gibson.  The shark eats another Navy ship, too.  I'm having a little trouble figuring out just how big this shark is, but apparently it's magically able to shrink and grow so that it dwarfs whatever it wants to eat.  Oh, yeah, it also takes a big chunk out of the Golden gate bridge, and somewhere in here the octopus swats a plane out of the air. 

The next scheme is to lure the two creatures to the same place and let them fight it out.  (Gibson comes up with this one in a dream, and she calls it the Thrilla in Manila after the 1975 boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, a reference that most viewers of this film probably didn't get.  To her credit, Gibson actually looked uncomfortable delivering that particular line.)  The rationale for this approach is that since the two monsters were fighting a hundred million years ago when they were frozen, then obviously they hate each other and will go at it again if they meet up, and since they're both vicious killers then of course they'll successfully kill each other.  Whatever.  We're in the home stretch now.

Everyone loads up on submarines (the sets for the submarine look surprisingly like the sets for the surface ships with some props moved around), and the creatures are led north, back to the very same icy area we started at what seems like 37 hours ago.  Shark chases sub.  Octopus destroys some other subs.  Seiji's sub loses power.  Shark and Octopus fight.  Shark bites off same octopus tentacle at least twice.  Octopus wraps shark up.  At some point, both creatures apparently decide they've had enough and JUST STOP FIGHTING AND SINK DEAD TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA.  I had to watch that twice, but there really isn't any clearly fatal injury inflicted by either on the other.  They just sink.  I suspect what I witnessed there was the last dollar of the CGI budget being spent.

Cue rescue of Seiji.  Cue forced romantic shot of Emma and Seiji watching the sunset.  Cue Sean Connery wannabe running up with a red folder containing evidence of some other mysterious giant sea life for the team to investigate.  Cue end credits.  Beautiful, sweet, end credits. 

OK.  I watched this so you don't have to.  You owe me.   In fairness, I didn't really expect it to be any better than it was - I mean look at the title.  However, the idea had at least the potential to be entertaining in the same way that Snakes on a Plane was entertaining.  Alas, Lorenzo Lamas must've really held his ground on his fee, which clearly ate up all the budget for things like script polishing, editing, and post production.  The worst thing is that I can't unwatch it.  The only other film that I can think of that exceeds the level of awful that MSvGO reaches is Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter.  I'll spare everyone the review of that one...

CB

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¹For those of you who don't remember, Ms. Gibson had something that resembled a singing career in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Even after looking up her discography, I can't honestly say I remember any of her songs. She has also apparently been romantically linked to Lorenzo Lamas, which makes her complete lack of screen chemistry with him either very puzzling or totally logical, depending on how you look at it.

²It's worth mentioning here that there's a discernible, if not particularly well-thought-out environmental message here, as evidenced by a couple of global warming comments, references to the environment, and such.  It could just be that whoever wrote the "script" through in whatever buzzwords he could think of.  Not sure.  In any case, casting this as an environmental movie doesn't really help it.

³I should mention that the octopus really gets screwed on screen time.  By and large when either beast is on screen, it's the shark (specifically the same shots of the shark).  Clearly the CGI tools the film makers picked up from the clearance shelf at Best Buy wasn't up to the task of animating something with eight distinct moving appendages...  If the octopus has an agent, he should fire him.