Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus [2009]

September 2, 2009

I mean really, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, what’s next Giga Elephant vs Humongous Giraffe? Everything about this movie is cheesy, from the script to the effects and cast. I will just take you through the first few scenes, just to prepare you for the rest of the movie. During the exploration of the sea, a minisub with one hot female and one fat guy accidentally sees their worst nightmare. A prehistoric fight of colossal dimensions. The minisub looks like it’s a 10-year-old’s school project. And we’re not even over the five-minute mark.

At exactly 03.45 when she says to cut the engine, the fat guy presses something that looks like a rubber kids’ toy. And what’s with all the random shots of the ocean? I guess they are really important to the story and were really cheap to shoot. I could go on and on, but it’s much more interesting to discover these things. You get the laughs, but you also learn something about movie-making. And next time it’s going to be much easier to spot a bad movie. One thing is certain however, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus is a movie so bad that it’s good.

It’s one of the best bad movies The Asylum released so far and I have a feeling there will be many of them in the future. If you release a trailer for a crappy C movie and that trailer goes viral, you know that you have something special. And the best parts of the movie are in this trailer. One of them includes the Mega Shark or Sharkzilla, as it’s called in the movie, jumping from the sea and eats an unsuspecting airplane midflight. What, you didn’t know all Sharkzilla have this amazing ability to jump out of the sea and bite everything in their range?

Of course, airplanes are sharks’ natural enemies. And this is the reason why it jumped more than 12000 m (35000 ft) in the air. The cruising altitude of a normal commercial jet airplane today is around 12000 m (35000 ft). Since the title of this movie is Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, you might be wondering what’s giant octopus doing while the mega shark is causing all this havoc. Well, he was fighting his archenemy, the oil rig. And to make things weirder, if that’s even possible, he also doesn’t like airplanes for some reason.

As you can see, the basic premise of this movie is to use preposterous and intentionally unrealistic scenes to generate that wow effect and entertain the viewers. And it worked. The script was equally bad as the CGI but both of these elements were also fascinating. As you already know, I’m a huge fan of eighties bad movies so it took me a while to warm up to this new generation. Luckily, Lorenzo Lamas was here to bridge the gap. Apart from him, I also want to mention Deborah Gibson who gave a pitch-perfect performance for this type of production.