Mega
Shark Vs. Giant Octopus is a 2009 Direct-to-DVD film
created by The Asylum, a film studio of masterminds behind other spectacular
films like Nazis At The Center Of The
Earth, Abraham Lincoln vs Zombies
and Titanic II. If you hadn’t guessed
by now that this is not exactly Oscar-worthy stuff then you’d have even less sense
then this film studio does. That isn’t to say that I don’t like the film. Far
from it – I think it’s fucking brilliant! This is a gloriously bad movie.
Admittedly, there are times when it’s frustrating how terrible it is, but if
you just let yourself be open to it then it’s a giant, hilarious disaster, a
bit like the Jeremy Kyle Show. Or Jeremy Kyle himself.
The plot (if you can call it that) basically breaks down
like this: During some underwater study nonsense carried out by an oceanographer played by 80’s pop star Debbie Gibson, some military sonar device
that is dropped into the ocean at the same time and a helicopter crash causes
the Mega Shark and Giant Octopus to be thawed from the ice of a glacier and
they go around causing havoc. It’s up to Debbie Gibson and a load of other
science types to figure out what’s going on and how to stop it. Along the way
there’s some bullshit sub-plots and a message about being kind to animals but nobody’s
watching it to see that. They’re watching it for the giant prehistoric
creatures (did I mention they were prehistoric?) kicking the shit out of humans
and each other.
And when they do, it’s fucking glorious. Just imagine the
most ridiculous shit you think you could get away with in a film with this
title and multiply it by 10. The first attack we see Mega Shark make is on a
plane. That’s right. A FUCKING AEROPLANE. The Mega Shark leaps thousands of
feet out of the water, into the air and bites the plane out of the fucking sky!
Not to be outdone, the Giant Octopus’ first order of business is to destroy an
oil rig like he’s the Kraken from Pirates
of the Caribbean. AND THOSE ARE JUST
THE FIRST ATTACKS. The sheer ludicrousness of the entire film only escalates
from there. It’s the kind of stuff that makes you spit out your drink so that
you can yell “Whaaaaaaaaaat!?” at the screen, then turn to your friend and piss
yourselves laughing at it. And no, it doesn’t matter that that may distract you
from the film because even if you paid complete attention to the whole thing it
would still be poorly-structured, cliché-ridden, horribly acted batshit lunacy
that doesn’t seem to make any sense whatsoever.
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| Yep. This actually happens. |
The film does its best to pad out this paper-thin story with
a few sub-plots that have about as much business being there as your Grandad
does being at a Skrillex concert. There’s a token romance that rears its ugly
head about halfway through for seemingly no other reason than the writers
couldn’t think of anything else for one of the giant monsters to destroy and
they needed to extend the running time. It occurs pretty much out of the
fucking blue between our Debbie and ‘Dr. Shimada’, the Japanese scientist she’s
working with. That’s the official job title he gives when he introduces himself,
by the way. Not 'Marine Biologist' or 'Experimental Physicist' etc. Nope.
Scientist. “I’m a scientist. What do I do? SCIENCE!” They exchange about 4 lines of dialogue about
their backstories – well, I say their backstories, but all the guy says is “Me
too” to whatever she says, in the flimsiest attempt to establish a rapport with
somebody since you tried flirting with your friend’s hot older sibling when you
were 13 – before they get down to an uncomfortable love scene. There’s less
chemistry going on here with these two than there is in the laughable “science”
montage where everyone pours different coloured liquids into beakers and does
their best to convince us they aren’t all wondering why the fuck they agreed to
be in this movie. There’s also some stuff about a professor being fired, a
government official being racist and a nameless submarine crew member pulling a
gun on the captain. It’s all pointless but the hilarity of these moments far
outweighs the ridiculousness of them, so you become kind of glad that they’re there.
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| Scientists doing science! |
It’s not all so-bad-it’s-good of course, and some of it is
just frustratingly terrible. The number of times the screen suddenly flickers
into black-and-white vision for half a second then back to colour is funny for
a bit and then it just gets on your tits. There’s no need for it to be there
and in a film that already looks this terrible it’s actually irritating to see
the filmmakers actively trying to make it look worse.
Establishing shots that display a caption to show where we are take up probably
about 2-3 full minutes of screen time, and they happen so frequently it’s just
insulting to the audience’s intelligence. It's not like it matters. Most viewers will spend screen time without the monsters doing something more worthwhile, like watching paint dry or sniffing glue. But overall, it’s worth it to witness what beautiful disaster the
rest of the film is. It’s trying really hard, but it just doesn’t know what the
hell it’s supposed to do or how – as if it was written by your younger brother
after he’d drank 12 cans of Red Bull and just watched Godzilla for the first
time.
And that’s where its “so-bad-it’s-good” charm lies. It’s
actually trying so hard to make you enjoy yourself that it becomes endearing
and you actually do start liking it, even if it’s for all the wrong reasons. The
characters are clichéd, the plot is thinner than a picture of Kate Moss (ooh
pop culture!) and the special effects are terrible. Seriously, they’re woefully
bad. For a film that is named after two CGI creatures, you would not
believe how poorly put together that footage is. Not only that, but they re-use
the same shots of the Shark and Octopus constantly! There’s one sequence where
Mega Shark’s fin comes menacingly closer and closer to a boat, but then they
re-use the footage and so the shark doesn’t actually gets any closer to the boat,
as if he can’t quite decide if he’s hungry for sailors or not (Oh dear, that
sounded far more like sexual innuendo than I intended). Just watch the epic
final clash between Mega Shark and Giant Octopus and you’ll see what I mean –
even the fight the entire movie is based around seems half-assed and poorly
edited. The acting is woeful (what else do you expect from Debbie Gibson?), the
sets would be better if they’d been drawn in crayon on the wallpaper, and the
whole thing is riddled with clichés. The characters, the dialogue – everything!
My particular favourite is Debbie’s boss who gives her shit about her conduct
at work because he seems to have been lifted from a 1980’s American police Drama.
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| The epic final battle. Jesus. |
Suffice to say, this film is an utter car crash, but a
hilarious one. A car crash of two tiny cars filled with fat clowns skidding on
a custard pie off a motorway. Wait, that sounds slightly terrifying actually.
The point is, if you go in knowing what to expect (and with a title like that
you must do) then it’s a complete riot. You’ll laugh uproariously at the hammy
acting, wooden dialogue and the general over-the-top shenanigans of the title
characters. It’s well worth the £2.99 I paid for the DVD. You’ll have paid more
to see worse films. Damn you, Benjamin Button.
