Customer Reviews

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(24)

 

 

Simply put, if you're here reading reviews about this movie you probably know exactly what to expect out of it, and already know if this is something you will enjoy or not.

It's a wonderfully cheesy movie chock full of over the top moments that border on being just plain silly, but that's the way I like it. If you're a fan of B movies do yourself a favor and give this a watch.

If you don't know that this is a cheesy movie by the title or the cover, there is no hope for you. Where else can you see a giant shark eat the Golden Gate Bridge? Or a giant octopus swat down jets? That would be enough to make me buy it.

Although this movie has a far bigger ambition than budget, it still manageed to delight and entertain me throughout all of its 89 minutes. It's by far the best movie THE ASYLUM has produced yet and while it certainly isn't up to the production standards of big budget hollywood stuff, it is often far more entertaining than the overblown hype Michael Bay and his ilk come up with. Honestly, the movie has a very striking, almost psychodelic look with loads of wild, garish lighting and lurid color schemes. The editing is fast and frantic and the visual effects are occasionally almost passable. The acting is over the top (and lots of fun) and the script is really out there. I truly enjoyed and appreciated this thing a lot. The DVD transfer is especially excellent and on an upconverting DVD player it often approaches bluray picture quality. The super aggressive Dolby 5.1 surround sound will also give your subwoofer a real workout (although dialog is sometimes a bit distorted). Plenty of surround effects as well for an emersive experience. The premise of this one is so goofy and it moves along with a giddy speed that kept me smiling from start to finish. I loved it.

I caught a early showing of this straight-to-dvd gem. Let's be frank, this film will have a cultural impact for generations to come. I was immersed in a fantastical world of intrigue, science and drama that only a genius on par with Jules Vern could concoct. Deborah Gibson puts on the performance of a lifetime rivaled only by the shear artistry of one Lorenzo Lamas. Their combined performance will quicken the pulse, warm the heart and entertain.

...and here's why:
When I saw the previews I was pretty excited. Here was a 21st century production that reminded me of childhood Saturday's watching old Godzilla movies. I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. When it arrived I got the kids together and put it on. Now, don't get me wrong. So much of this film is exactly what I expected. Silly, exciting, entertaining. What I didn't like was the moments of course language and the sex scene. Totally not needed in this kind of movie that should really be a true "G" rated film in order to rate up there with the most popular "B" movies of the 50's and 60's. If not for that, I would've easily given it 5 stars for pure "FUN"!

......a big debt of gratitude to the giant creature features of the 50's. Back then the mutations were the results of atomic radiation, nowadays it's global warming. Two mortal enemies from the ice age are released due to the melting of the ice shelf. Sent to save the world is Debbie Gibson? and Lorenzo Lamas?. The casting alone adds to the giggle factor. The shark stakes out the west coast as his territory and the octopus chooses the coast of Japan.

Each of our giant critters have their own hilarious and improbable destruction scenes. The shark manages to fly from the ocean and swallow a airliner-he also bites the Golden Gate Bridge in half. Octopus slaps a military jet to pieces-admittedly the jet is only flying 100 feet above the water-I was laughing so hard at these scenes, tears were literally running down my face. I had to wipe them a few more times watching Lorenzo Lamas trying to act macho, and Debbie Gibson not acting at all.

Heavy artillary fire and torpedoes and explosion do nothing to slow the rampaging creatures so Debbie has the brilliant idea to lure the mortal enemies together and let them kill each other.

This leads to a death battle that makes the viewer start to chuckle, that leads to a guffaw, that leads to an all out belly laugh.

Picture this: when the two face- off the octopus wraps his tentacles around sharky and in one of the all-time worst special effects-this looks like a beanie baby octopus hugging a sardine. LOL LOL LOL.

This movie is highly recommended for those who like to laugh-I do, that's why the 3 stars---but keep in mind, the film-makers intended this to be a serious movie. (You can always spot when a film-maker is serious when he hires Lorenzo Lamas and Debbie Gibson as the heroes).

Quick, what's part-shark, part-octopus, and gorges itself on stupid morons just dying to be eaten?

Before there was Sharktopus, there was Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.

It all starts with Debbie Gibson in a submarine. Read that carefully. Debbie. Gibson. Submarine. Got that? Good.

So the U.S. government is trying to shatter the ice shelf, which accidentally releases a carcharocles megalodon (Mega Shark) and octopus giganteus (Giant Octopus). Never mind that they were frozen in ice and instantly come to life as soon as the iceberg is shattered. Point being they're free to continue their battle, which is to chase each other around in the ocean, destroying battleships, submarines, and slow-moving jetliners in the process.

Then Lorenzo Lamas shows up as a government representative, with an evil-mandated ponytail (of course). The entire purpose of his existence is apparently to contradict everything Gibson says with a snarky aside.

As an acting exercise, this is a terrible film. The stultifying presence of Lamas' perpetual sneer and Gibson's wide-eyed, heavily-made up gawk create such a black hole of suck that the only reason the octopus and the shark don't get pulled into it is because they're so big.

As a gore-fest, this is a terrible film. The monsters are so large that there really isn't any gore to speak of. They just smash poorly rendered CG of planes, trains, and automobiles.

As a kaiju monster battle, this is a terrible film. The monsters never appear in their full glory; instead, the octopus lamely wraps a tentacle or two around the shark. Then, because the guys at movie house Asylum obviously didn't have enough budget, they replay the scene again. Then they flip it and replay it again in the vain hope you don't notice. We noticed.

As a film, this is a terrible film. The hand actor who uses different nail polish to pilot the submarine is obviously not Gibson, who doesn't wear the same polish. "Science" consists of brightly colored beakers poured into test tubes. Battleships fire in just one direction (forward) even though the giant monsters - the proverbial broad side of a barn - are right next to them...because Asylum couldn't get stock footage of the guns turning.

Don't be fooled by the fact that the trailer for this movie went viral. Those are the only good scenes in the entire film, and they alone are not enough to save it. No, nothing can save it; not even the combined superpowers of Debbie Gibson and Lorenzo Lamas.

Sharktopus eats this movie for breakfast.

I saw part of "Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus" when it had its cable TV premier on the idiotically renamed Syfy channel a few months ago. I knew I had to obtain it for my library. How could I not, it has all the stars in the cheese universe perfectly aligned: ridiculous title, ludicrous plot, complete lack of knowledge about sharks, octopi, or the military weaponry needed to fight them, preachy environmentalist plotpoints, terrible acting, and cast members that Ed Wood could only dream of, most notably Debbie (oh sorry, Deborah) "Shake Your Love" Gibson, and master cheese maker Lorenzo Lamas. It's a perfect conflagration.

The film starts in the mountains (?) of Alaska, and after a very long credit sequence, progresses to oceanologist Emma (Debbie Gibson) driving a stolen submarine under a glacial icecap while a helicopter hovers overhead dropping a secret buoy into the water which makes a pod of whales get suicidal, and ram into a glacier freeing two long-frozen combatants, a huge shark and really huge octopus from millions of years of freezer burn. For some reason the helicopter crashes, and Gibson doesn't know about the buoy, but the helicopter pilot intones over the radio that it's a secret and that it could endanger national security. But Debbie hijacked the sub, right? So why is the secret government helicopter helping her look for whales? What? Huh? This is just the first five minutes of the movie. Unfortunately it gets way less lucid from there.

Shortly Gibson gets fired from her job, and goes to live with her old brilliant professor, Lamar (Sean Lawlor) who was booted out of the Navy for running a nuclear sub aground to avoid hitting a pod of dolphins. Oh yes, there's more true-to-life backstory for you. Meanwhile, a deep-ocean oil rig gets eaten by the giant octopus, while the giant shark gets busy by jumping 30,000 feet in the air and eating a 747 in cruise flight. Truly, Asylum Home Entertainment really pulled out all the stops on this creature feature. And the CGI is so lifelike, too!

There's a lot of extremely ponderous dialogue in the movie, much of it with a brain-addled environmentalist bent, but also lots of terrible pillow talk, ridiculous science talk, and perhaps worst of all, oodles of military and nautical jargon horribly misused by the screenwriters. A favorite example is when in a discussion of the release of the giant creatures Debbie says "Maybe this is our comeuppance." Why would that be? Oh, of course: it's because man is melting the polar ice caps with his global warming releasing these prehistoric predators. The shark and octopus dyad is also analogized to Hurricane Katrina. I am not even kidding.

There are two scenes of shark versus battleship (there are no battleships in the active Navy inventory, by the way, but that is picking at nits) and at one point the shark manages to set a hijacked Finnish oil tanker on fire after it was hijacked by pirates. How did the shark do that? Some unnamed government agency headed by Lorenzo Lamas (as Allan Baxter, complete with ponytail) interrogates Emma, Lamar, and Emma's new love interest, the pointedly Japanese Seiji Shimada (Vic Chao, who probably turns in the best performance of the movie) in a room that Lamar accuses of having "the same lighting as Guantanamo". Got to get every popular anti-government jab in, no matter how laughably executed.

After the eye-rolling exhortation "Sharkzilla's going to own the seas!" from Lamas, the scientists come up with a plan to corral them in San Francisco and Tokyo Bays for the shark and octopus respectively. But how to lure them? While working under armed guard, Emma suddenly feels...urges...and invites Seiji into the broom closet to help shake her love. It's then they get their "ah ha" moment...pheromones! They will synthesize giant octopus and mega shark pheromones to lure them to their respective bays "using UAV technology". Again...what?!? Really?

After the gratuitous destruction of an F-15/F-14/F-18 (depending on which piece of the stock footage you were paying attention to) by an octopus tentacle, we get a load of pontification from Emma analogizing herself to Einstein and Oppenheimer and the decision to build the atomic bomb. (Seriously.) After some submerged action of a highly ridiculous nature, they release the shark pheromone with much ado, the shark accelerates to 500 knots underwater (marine engineers, feel free to chime in on hydrodynamics here) and the Octopus is cornered in Tokyo Bay by similar means. The shark promptly gets loose, eats the Golden Gate Bridge (why?) and Lamas considers the nuclear option prompting disgraced Irish former submariner Lamar to say that the nuclear option is preferred by the US government because "that's the military way." This only goes to prove not only the reflexive ideology of the filmmakers, but their total lack of grasp on actual US military policy, training, or strategy. Not that I should expect much from a movie like this, of course.

Emma decides that the way to get rid of them is to have them battle each other, so a flotilla of navy ships and submarines puts to sea with more pheromones attracting the two combatants to each other. All goes about like you would expect, with massive causalities ("All five ships destroyed by octopus!") and Emma and Lamar taking their submarine through an ice floe to lose the pursuing shark (which is, of course, impossible if he can swim faster than most jets can fly). Obviously the final smackdown happens in good time, and amid clouds of ink in a ferocious battle, the two prehistoric killing machines sink out of sight. Are they dead? Wait for the sequel.

The film ends with lovebirds Emma and Seiji planning their future dreamily on a beach (their chemistry is...uh...amazing) when Lamar walks up and requests their services to help identify another giant life form in the North Sea. Groan.

The DVD comes with extras, notably a lame "making of" feature and some bloopers, which aren't especially funny. Feel free to skip both. I gave the film three stars. I would have given it four for camp value but the complete ignorance of the subject matter and portrayals of the US military as idiots lowered the rating. Submariners are not likely to mutiny by pulling a pistol on their skipper, but then again they aren't likely to battle a giant shark either. This film takes itself way too seriously for the subject matter, but would have made an excellent MST3K. This would make an excellent Christmas gift for the lover of cinematic cheese in your life.

Yes, with a title like that, how can this film be ANYTHING other than a "so bad it's good" movie?

The performances are all of the "I-need-the-paycheque" variety.
The special effects are entirely of the "we-wasted-all-our-money-on-the-actor's-salaries" variety.
Which left VERY little money to actually pay the writing staff.

But hey! I still laughed uproariously during the whole thing! it was a hoot.

MEGA SHARK VS GIANT OCTOPUS

Oh that silly Asylum is up to it again this time bringing forth two giant creatures from the sea to do battle. Well that is of course if they don't kill all of us as well, oh them crazy monsters. The Asylum Productions is one of my favorite production companies because they actually don't care and put out not only stuff like this but Mock Busters as well. Those would be the rip offs of other successful films out there, yes you read that right. Still this is an Asylum production so you really can't expect much these days, except the director is actually good. Well at least he was when he directed one of the best the company had called "666 The Child", and an excellent episode of Hercules The Legendary Journey [also wrote a Xena episode].

The film follows some researchers who are in the artic or something and accidentally release two frozen monsters from their icy cages. You guessed it a giant shark, sorry Mega, and a giant octopus, got that one right. Once that happens both creatures whom I guess were frozen in mist of a battle with one another instantly go opposite directions and start killing all humans on the sea or in the air [even planes are not safe]. So countries come together and try to first capture and then kill the creatures. Of course that does not work so they lure them together to continue their once legendary battle.

This is exactly what you think of when you think B movie with little in way of a budget, really it is that horrible. The CGI for the creatures are just laughable but hey I guess that is all they could afford. But the writing and direction of Jack Perez whom I like and have enjoyed some of his other work must have just done this for the pay check. I would like to think that he was held down by the budget and his vision was dramatically altered, I hope. His film for Asylum called "666 The Child" was excellent for low budget fare and was a great low budget version of "The Omen". But this one is so bad it could be good depending if you like this type of stuff. Also the acting in this is down right awful most of the time with only a few moments of decency.

This film is bad and I mean it is really bad with horrible CGI monster jumping out of the water eating planes and a huge shark taking a chunk off of the Golden Gate Bridge. Still it is good for a laugh which we did a lot of, it is kinda funny. I would recommend this to people who like these types of flicks like me. If not then stay away because this is most likely not for you, but rent it I guess.