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Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus
Super-sized sea monsters attack in this low-budget creature feature starring former 1980s pop star Debbie Gibson
The title promises big things but nobody comes away from this inept monster mash-up looking clever. Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus is a shameless bid for unearned cultdom but it isn't good (as in bad) enough to qualify as genuinely bad (as in good) and nor can it maintain the cheerful tongue-in-cheekiness of its title. Over a million users checked out the trailer on Youtube prior to the film's UK release, spurred on by the fabulous title and the unlikely presence of former 1980s pop star Deborah (n?©e Debbie) Gibson battling the briny behemoths. If your curiosity, too, is piqued, proceed there forthwith and save yourself the further 83 minutes that make up the main feature's runtime. Gibson, who unbeknown to almost anyone in the UK has been pursuing a career as an actor since the early 1990s, stars as a Emma MacNeil, a sort of maverick marine biologist who, while trawling the depths in a stolen submarine, witnesses the US military drop an illegal sonic depth charge which re-animates the frozen beasts of the title. At first it looks like the greatest discovery since the invention of science, but when it becomes clear that Mega Shark (actually it's a Megalodon) and Giant Octopus (he's just an enormous octopus) intend to wreak havoc across the globe, Emma and even-more-maverick biologist Lamar Sanders (Sean Lawlor) are persuaded by pony-tailed military guy Allan Baxter (Lorenzo Lamas) to hatch a frankly stupid plan to entrap the beasts using home-made pheromones and then let the military nuke the titans to bits. It's a plot we might charitably describe as uncomplicated and it's approached with dogged earnestness by the cast. Gibson's Emma is given a romantic sub-plot involving Japanese scientist Shimada (Vic Chao), but writer-director Jack Perez's storytelling relies heavily on glowering soldiers - mystified, no doubt, by the circumstances in which they find themselves - and sequences in which scientists pour the coloured contents of one test tube into another. "This is a menace," says Shimada, "the like of which no one has ever imagined." And which, it has to be said, still hasn't been very successfully imagined here. TV and movie critics have a phrase - 'jumping the shark' - which indicates the jettisoning of credibility in favour of some loopy ratings stunt. (It comes from an episode of 'Happy Days' in which the Fonz water-skis over a shark.) Whether by happy accident or cunning design, Perez's film has its own Mega Shark literally leap out of the ocean, ascend some way up into the sky and bite a passing jumbo jet in half. This is never explained. Nor is it ever referred to again. It's just something we have to accept. It's a rare moment of campy comedy in a film which, having presented itself as an exercise in smirking daftness, then fails to exploit its greatest asset. Mega Shark was initially conceived as a 3D project but the funding failed to materialise. As it is the effects are almost endearingly poor. The final showdown wouldn't look out of place in 'Thunderbirds' and it's accompanied by a watery gurgle mysteriously absent from every other underwater scene in the film. The characters themselves can only dream of a second dimension. As a perky heroine Gibson is fine but poor Sean Lawlor and Lorenzo Lamas deserve a small reward for making it through their exchanges without cracking up, giving up, or just walking slowly away. Mega Shark comes from production company The Asylum whose cheerfully shonky exercises in faux exploitica (Transmorphers, Snakes On A Train) have been dubbed 'mockbusters'. Putting aside the notion that Samuel L Jackson grappling serpents in the clouds isn't already beyond parody, Perez's film ought to be an hour-and-a-half of beery, dumb-ass fun. Instead it has the weary air of a genuinely disastrous disaster movie. Size, it seems, matters after all. Verdict Not big, not clever, and not a whole lot of fun. |
