Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus [Blu-ray]

Watched this thing last night.

Okay, let's see...

Cool premise. I mean, really, a big shark versus a massive octopus? That just reeks cool.

The story was more or less solid. Some parts were predictable, especially the "how to get rid of them" part.

The acting . . . well, aside from Deborah Gibson, who I thought was the most believable in terms of how she presented her character (except when she screwed around with Vic Chao, which seemed really out of the blue), needed lots of work. Seemed forced in a lot of ways, but this is a B-movie we're talking about so I was willing to not nitpick the acting because I just wanted to see shark vs octopus action.

The special FX were okay, a 6 or so on a scale of 1-10. Some stuff looked super fake. Others, namely the underwater sequences, looked real. My only issue with the underwater stuff was that you lost all sense of scale because there was nothing to compare these guys to (as compared to when the shark took a huge bite out of the Golden Gate Bridge). However, you did get your sense of scale when the submarines tried to take the shark on.

The shark vs octopus fight was pretty good. How often do you see a giant octopus wrap its tentacles around a shark's entire body? I just wish, though, there was the budget to drag it out because the fight was kind of short-lived and was very simple in terms of the "fight moves" from each creature. Likewise, other shots of the creatures throughout the movie were just a glimpse here and there.

On a fun scale, this gets an 7 out of 10, but my official rating is a 5. I think there was better acting in Transmorphers, and, well, guess I am nitpicking a little.

A.P. Fuchs

I made the mistake of watching this movie alone. I knew full well what I was getting into when I bought it. I was just hoping for it to be so bad it would be funny every single minute, but it ended up only being funny a couple times. It's one of those movies, like "The Room" or "Denizen" you just don't watch alone and go to a public screening or something.

I guess it was just too good to be true. Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, with the object of one of my teen crushes right there in the middle of the action. Man, I had been looking forward to this movie so much, especially after seeing the cheesy greatness of Mega Piranha. Sadly, I must report that Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus just doesn't deliver the goods. Rather than letting us sit back and revel in the prehistorically gigantic havoc wreaked by our two title characters, some nimrod went and used up most of the time with a poorly written, downright stupid storyline.

As the story is told to us, a Megaladon and a giant octopus chose to stay and fight when all the rest of their species were fleeing the effects of the Ice Age (as if the Ice Age just suddenly happened overnight rather than over the course of a few million years). There they stayed, frozen in ice, until some stupid government project accidentally unleashed them on the world. The next thing you know, both military and civilian vessels are being attacked all over the world. The US military throws its collective hands up in the air after failing to kill the giant shark with a few naval guns, while the Japanese are apparently content to put all of its government trust in some junior scientist who comes to America to join forces with a university professor and his former student. Normally, as we all know, the Japanese would find some little boy in short pants and put him in charge of a whole task force, so I don't know what they were thinking here. Anyway, our trio of scientific geniuses comes up with a plan to lure the creatures into San Francisco Bay and Tokyo Bay. You can guess how well that works out.

The absolute highlight of this entire movie involves Mega Shark and a commercial jet (Michael Jordan has nothing on Mega Shark). It's all downhill after that scene - and, unfortunately, that scene takes place fairly early in the movie. Except for a grumpy Lorenzo Lamas, this whole film is basically an exhibition of bad acting. I was a Debbie Gibson fan long after it was no longer a cool thing to be, but Deborah is less than convincing here as a renegade marine biologist and - as much as it pains me to say it - she has not aged all that well. She's still a better actor than her co-star Vic Chao, though. The romantic subplot that develops between their two characters has to be the most tepid and lifeless romance in the history of cinema.

Even though this is the most disappointing of all the Asylum monster movies I've seen, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus has the distinction of being the first Asylum production to be given a theatrical release. According to IMDB, it only opened on one screen in the UK, but I guess that's enough to count as an official theatrical release. I can also report that, having done Mega Shark wrong with this movie's inane plot, Asylum brought him back to fight a giant crocodile in the much more entertaining Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus.