Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus
Year:
2009
Directed by:
Ace Hannah (AKA Jack Perez)
Rated:
R
Country:
United States
Runtime:
1 hr. 30 min.
Production Company:
The Asylum
Written by:
Ace Hannah (AKA Jack Perez)
Starring:
Deborah Gibson
Vic Chao
Lorenzo Lamas
Sean Lawlor
Similar Films:
Mega title vs. dubious humor.
There is an episode of my current favorite TV show, The Venture Bros., in which a young female character is talking to a friend about an upcoming (half-) blind double date with the two young and naïve Venture brothers. She tells her friend that the friend's date dresses like Buddy Holly. "That's pretty cool," the other responds." The first corrects her: "Yeah, but I think he does it accidentally."
That last line sums up my ambivalence toward Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus. Don't misunderstand me; it is very clear, based on the title, the trailer, and a number of scenes in the film, that Mega Shark understands, acknowledges, and revels in its own absurdness. However, what I'm not entirely sure of is whether all the bad parts of the film are ironic or if some are actually bad. At the end of the day, though, it doesn't matter as long as you're entertained. The only thing about Mega Shark that I can rightfully complain about is the fact that there should have been more mega shark and much more giant octopus.
Millions of years ago, a megalodon (a prehistoric shark that in real life couldn't have been a quarter the size of the beast in the movie) and a giant octopus were fighting. Somehow they were suddenly frozen, mid-fight, into a block of ice, perfectly preserving their bodies. Cut to 2009. Some secret military operation causes lots of whales to bash themselves into a huge glacier, which just so happens to contain the frozen creatures, breaking up said crater and thus releasing the relics, who jump to life and swim off in perfect health. But now they're hungry, and you know nothing sates prehistoric creatures' hunger like oil rigs, in-flight commercial jets, and Golden Gate Bridges, right?
Oh yes, in this movie, the mega shark actually has an in-flight commercial jet for lunch, and it's not even flying low. This is the peak of the film. We're treated to a scene of passengers inside the plane as it experiences some turbulence, and all of a sudden one of them looks out the window and sees an enormous shark flying through the air just before he chomps down on the airliner. Making this scene even better is the fact that it is played from different angles. We first see the shark's gaping jaws from inside the plane. Then we switch to an even more hilarious view: a wide-shot. From this perspective you see simply an enormous shark tens of thousands of feet in the air crashing directly into a plane, latching on, and spinning around with the plane crumbling in its mouth. Of course something explodes, too.
Unfortunately, very few other scenes come close the greatness achieved in that one. Most of the film's badness is used not on ridiculous giant creature stunts but on more mundane elements such as dialogue. This is where I become unsure that everything bad is intentional. Some of it seems like truly flawed B-level writing, like the following purely expositional, purely artificial line near the beginning of the film: "Remember, Lieutenant, this mission is classified. Should there be any trouble, the government will deny its existence." This is spoken in the middle of a mission, not in a briefing, and serves only to say, "Hey audience, by the way, this is a secret, illegal operation the government's doing."
Other lines seem a bit more likely to be purposefully dumb. At one point, Dr. Shimada, a Japanese scientist, while going on about how individual paths intersecting is what creates and destroys things, blah, blah, blah, eventually makes the statement that the universe itself was created in such a way. He says this not as a revelation or a personal belief but off-handedly, like a reminder of some common knowledge. At another point, before the shark's existence has been widely acknowledged, the creature races toward a Navy ship full of panicked sailors. One of them basically shoves his face up to the screen (our screen) and whispers, "It rises." Yeah, that's real ominous, but people don't talk like that.
The flaws, intentional or unintentional, go beyond the dialogue, too. Whenever the three main characters are conducting lab work, every chemical liquid looks like a melted popsicle. They're also often kneeling and peering just over the lab countertops at these liquids like enthralled children. Then there is the solution the main characters devise to get rid of the creatures: lead them to each other so that they will finish their fight and kill one another. When I told my wife this, she responded, "Usually when two things fight they don't both die." No. No they don't.
