Customer Reviews

Megalodon

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Quick... what's not in widescreen and has no special features? That's right - MEGALODON! SIXTY FEET OF PREHISTORIC TERROR - or so claims the box art. This film may be about a shark, but the production is all about FRANKENSTEIN. Seen JAWS? How about THE ABYSS, ALIEN, REPTILICUS, DEEP BLUE SEA, DEEP STAR SIX or LEVIATHAN? Then you've seen most, if not all, of MEGALODON. It's all here - the high tech multi-billion dollar drill site, a small, but the "best at what they do" crew, the ill timed major storm (snow and ice), an ill crewman, a lost world filled with lost fish stuffed with lost Magalodons, the standard crew roundtable scar sharing scene, a spunky blond girl reporter and her husky semi-comic cameraman. Tiny one man (one woman) subs, a helicopter crash, several "tragic" deaths all capped off with a whiz-bang explosion at the end which solves most (but not all) of the problems. MEGALODON takes no chances by leaving nothing to the imagination. It simply takes no risks - which is odd since it tries so hard to move in another direction all the time. There's a good story here blocked by a very large shark. The Magalodon doesn't come into view until halfway through the film and up until then you may find yourself wondering when they're just going to get on with it - but once the shark does arrive, does get into frame - you begin to realize that there was something more building here.

We've seen the destruction of the environment used time and again in these kinds of films - it's a backdrop. It's something for the creator and builder of the worlds biggest and deepest oil rig to ravage and lay waste to - but here, the head of the COLOSSUS is actually a pretty good guy trying to provide the world with the fuel it needs. When they stumble upon the lair of the Megalodon there is no talk of drilling for more oil - they all are taken by the wonder of finding a LOST WORLD. It almost seems as if the story might breakaway here and follow a different direction. But it never does - the shark swims in, knocks things about, knocks things over, breaks through things, and then gets blown to bits. We skip into a THREE MONTHS LATER, get our CODA, then our STINGER that there is not one... but two, perhaps more Megalodons now loose in the world's oceans. Nifty - but dull.

There a TON of unanswered questions, and by the end you know the movie has cheated you (can anyone explain why the earthquakes were needed in this film? Also, was the anchor cable drilled into the ocean floor ever going to break? - they cut back to it at least three times after each quake and I kept waiting for it to snap and the COLOSSUS to tip over - never did). MEGALODON is what it is - full screen, ready for cable, jammed with a few nifty ideas and stuffed with off kilter CGI (the subs looks fake - but look clean, while the Megalodon itself looks and acts almost exactly like a plastic tub toy shark) effects. Not the best, not the worst - not JAWS or any of the rest...it's MEGALODON, and it's available for sale or to rent.

The Worlds biggest and safest oil rig is ready to drill on unstable ocean floor in the Arctic. Bad move. In a scene from Deep Star Six, the drilling opens up a huge cavern that is teeming with life that has gone extinct elsewhere 60-70 million years ago. One life form is a megalodon which leaves the rich feeding ground of the cave for the more barren waters of the Arctic (would you like a bridge with that?). Actually the first shark evidence, a shadow, does not appear until 47 minutes into the movie. The rig and the small cast are now at risk from a powerful predator.

Mistakes abound in this film in unexpected ways. I am used to these film getting the extinction dates wrong but this one got it right. However, it does play heck with a lot of other details. Imagine a body at 5,000 feet down that does not suffer from the pressure. Imagine and elevator and subs that travel the 5,000 feet from surface to ocean floor in a matter of minutes. Imagine a shark that has no internal organs (it is solid like a statue). Imagine planning rescue boats that have to be dropped bow first sixty feet to the water (and have wounded aboard). Watch visitors get invited to a dinner with no food and everyone leaves at the start.

The disk is very barren. Just play movie and a chapter selection. No trailers, commentary, behind the scenes (although it is credited in the credits), no nothing.

I risked this movie after reading comments here and elsewhere. Lets say that though Megalodon has a cool idea (prehistoric shark comes out of a fissure that gets opened up leading to a deeper underwater prehistoric ocean), the movie blows big time. Take the plot, and throw would could have been interesting and suspenseful right into the toilet and replace it with a story that plods along accompanied by actors who come from the "high, I just got into acting and am having fun trying to do this part" school of thought. There are a few interesting characters, and a few people show that they have acting potential, and if you get into the frame of mind where you can deal with all the large amounts of shiny computer game cgi, then there is still the problem that the movie just sucks anyways. It has that awful filmed, ultra low budge cinematography look to it, with lots of things extremely scrunched up real close in the frame (probably to hide the cheap backgrounds, but clearly the cinematography just sucks). The editing is also terrible, with places where you feel like saying yourself "ok, you can cut now, the moment is over, cut already." Do yourself a favor, if your looking for a decent shark movie outside of the jaws series, try Deep Blue Sea, or Red Water. Otherwise, here's to the day when the movie Megalodon becomes extinct. Megalodon Megasucks.

The trailer I viewed online for this movie made it look promising and after 2+ years of this movie sitting on the shelf, it was kind of a letdown and a waste of a $3.00 rental fee.
In all fairness, the original director (Tunnifcliffe) wanted his name removed from this film because it was heavily edited and changed from his original cut. I believe he wanted an R rating but they wanted PG-13. Who knows why though? It never got shown in theaters! The movie does have a few good points, but the bad points far outway them.
The acting and sets are pretty good for such a low budget film. Some of the CGI effects are pretty impressive but than there are some that weren't.
The rescue/life/drop boats briefly shown looked very cool and unfortunetly weren't explored as an option for a more exciting finale!
The bad points are numerous. Overly long beginning and end credits pad out the movies brief 90 minute running time. The shark doesn't appear until 52 minutes into the movie. The film wasn't the least bit exciting or suspenseful. NO extras or widescreen option on the DVD and the sound was poor especially on the actor's voices.
The so called CLIMAX was very brief and treaded very familiar terrority in regards to killing the shark. Nothing new here!
So out of all the low budget MEG shark movies currently out there on home video (Shark Attack 3:Megalodon, MEGALODON, Shark Hunter)it's certainley the best of the bunch, but that's not saying much. I'd give it MAYBE 2 to 2 1/2 stars out of 5. All of us shark movie fans need to keep out fingers crossed that the BIG BUDGET movie for Steve Alten's MEG book hits the big screen sometime soon!

I believe that MEGALODON is actually as close to real as any movie I've seen about this prehistoric shark. Only Spielberg could do it better.

MEGALODON is a pretty well made low budget film, with some impressive CGI visuals. The story is fairly simple: a state of the art oil rig (almost looks like a castle) is drilling into the ocean floor. This results in the opening of a huge cavern which releases icthylogical creatures from prehistoric times, including the titular creature. The problem is, we don't see the shark for at least 45 minutes, and then afterwards, we only see it for a little. If you're going to have a monster shark, you should show it more often, don't you think.
The characters are pretty stock, and the acting is passable. Al Sapienza as the white haired pilot is reminiscent of the old Steve Canyon in the comics, and he has a strong, but sensitive, presence. The rest of the cast is average.
MEGALODON is the latest in a recent surge in megalodonic films, and none of them will make us forget JAWS or the underappreciated DEEP BLUE SEA.

I rented Megaladon knowing it was a low budget B movie - but I still had hopes that it might not be bad. After all I've always been really interested in the movies real star - the Carcharadon Megalodon, ancestor of the great white that some scientists believe may have grown to sizes as large as 40 - 100 feet long. Some even believe the ancient shark species may still exist in the deep ocean. Cryptozoology is often the inspiration for plently of bad movies that sound good on paper.

Such is the case here. Megalodon suffers all-across the board. Bad acting, bad shots, bad plot, and poorly concieved diologue. It just sucks in every way it CAN suck. Effects-wise there's more CGI effect in this movie than most low budget movies out there. However most of the effects are noticabley low quality compared to mainstream motion pictures, and look good enough to be a video game cut scene but not quite photo realistic for use in a movie. I lost interest very quickly in this movie and by the time the Megalodon was chewing up a submersible the scene was so horrible I actually found myself laughing at the screen.

The one star Megalodon gets is for the very atractive lead role of Leighanne Littrell :) That and the fact it's impossible to give it 0 stars lol. Megalodon was so bad that even as a TV movie, it would fail misserably.

"Megalodon" is one of the cheapest and cheesiest shark movies I have ever seen. With great fidelity to the production values of the film, the DVD likewise looks cheap and has no extras. The film is one of the worst of the current crop of environmental disaster movies dedicated to the impact of global warming, though it's so disjointed that it utterly fails to make any serious impact. The movie opens with a faux newscast foreshadowing both offshore drilling and shark attack disasters in a highly implausible amalgam. The scene shifts to a pretty blonde reporter played by Leighanne Littrell and her lighthearted cameraman pal (Fred Belford) flying out to the CGI oil drilling platform "Colossus," anchored off the incredibly fragile ecosystem of Greenland. The small but dysfunctional crew includes a totally daffy environmentalist, Ross Elliot (Al Sapienza,) and a romance protagonist, submarine pilot Maz Zablenko (Jennifer Summerfield.) "Colossus" has it all, including an elevator to the sea floor 5,000 feet below, and a very mod mess hall. While the reporter gets holier-than-thou about the environment (boy is this dialogue bad,) the rest of the crew is abuzz about seismic activity in the area. To analyze the situation, the crew vacuums up a cod, and discover they are dealing with a fish long thought extinct.

After a crewman gets his arm bitten off by the prehistoric cod, they decide to take him ashore in a lifeboat (why don't they use the helicopter to take him off the platform?) Maz and Ross get sucked into a giant underwater cave amidst much emoting, finding photoluminescent fish, which is by far the best special effect in the film. After all that there's a dining room scene in which Ross shows off his hilariously big Lion's Mane Jellyfish sting scar. Interrupting that bit of action is an alarm for everyone to go below to check an underwater methane hydrate leak apparently caused by a collision with a whale. You know it's not going to be a whale, and you're right. It's a bad CGI 70 foot long shark, which fortunately starts by making annoying Grady (Gary J. Tunnicliffe) into a chew toy. Megalodon starts ramming the oil rig because it's attracted to the vibration of the generators; sadly most of our cast gets stuck in the elevator right below the surface as the only option is to turn station power off. (Oh the drama!) There follows an amazingly convoluted plan involving "blowing the locking pins" to let the elevator bob free, alighting on an iceberg, and getting picked up by a helicopter. In the fakest scene of the film, the shark bursts through the ice floe to eat survivors, and the helicopter crashes on the rig, further increasing the body count. (The shark doesn't eat very much in reality.) Ross goes to lure the shark away from the rig and plans to harpoon it with some tether lines after some bad dialogue about how "we've upset the balance of nature." (Another line: "He's a pretty smart fish!") Ross bumps the megalodon repeatedly with his submersible (why?) and elects to blow himself up with the ancient creature. Presumably this rights the balance of nature.

I will not detail the absolutely ridiculous and ponderous epilogue captioned "three months later," but suffice it to say that megalodons are apparently attracted to sailboats owned by women participating in a certain "environmental conference." Boo! Just...really...boo!

"Megalodon" teaches the popular lesson that technology and especially oil companies are evil, and that global warming can have unexpected effects on animals that are not predicted outside the realm of bad science fiction films. This is one of the worst recent animal disaster movies, as it is preachy, ponderous (the shark only appears about halfway into the film, and even then isn't in most of the big scenes,) and wanders all over the place being both vapid and unfocused. The acting is terrible, the script is laughable, and the environmentalist angle is both overblown and poorly executed. This one is definitely bad, but it's not so bad it's good, it just stops at bad and stays put.

Having read Steve Alten's novel MEG, years ago, which has nothing to do at all with this movie!! But it's a bloody great read!!!

Really whets the imagination, about what havoc can be wrecked by prehistoric sea creatures.

I found this movie to be really good. The special effects are really great. The plot is very good: oil drilling setup discovering a 'mirror prehistoric ocean' by accident, releasing the deadly Meg.

Very good special effects regarding the Meg.

Robin Sachs (from 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' tv series) and the cast do a fantastic job, by the way.

This film really has bite to it!!!!

With films like this coming out. It really makes me excited for more.
Honestly. I can't wait until the film people finally do the film adaption of Steve Alten's novel, as mentioned above. Please, people of the film industry, do the film adaption !!!!

I've always been a big fan of the original Jaws movie and thought Megalodon would be worth a look. Story line was predictable, special visual effects were terrible, and acting wasn't very good either. The movie just had no suspense like Jaws.