Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009)

Submitted by corwin on Mon, 8 Jun 2009 9:04pm

Once in a while, a movie comes along for which I am the target audience. Mega-Shark vs. Giant Octopus was just such a movie. It was obvious to me from the title alone that the fine people at The Asylum sat down one day and asked themselves the all important question: what would corwin like to sit down and watch? They clearly know my long-standing love of giant shark movies, and the way I'll run head-long into a "versus" movie. And, in a stroke of marketing genius, they took a like from Snakes on a Plane and gave it a title from which anyone can immediately tell if they want to see it. And from the moment I heard of Mega-Shark vs. Giant Octopus, I wanted to see it!

Originally, this was to be the perfect trifecta of monster movie awesome: mega-shark, giant octopus, and 3-D! Sadly, they ran out of money in this extravaganza and couldn't release it as a 3-D feature. Up until I read that, I had these wondrous dreams of sharks and octopus tentacles reaching right out of the screen. It would have been a thing of sublime beauty.

As it was, Mega-Shark vs. Giant Octopus was everything I had hoped it would be. It had a nicely rudamentary plot where clandestine military testing of some kind of sonic device awoke a megalodon shark and a giant octopus from a ten-million year slumber. They each went on separate rampages, the shark concentrating on San Francisco while the octopus made a beeline straight for Japan. While the Americans were clearly unprepared for the devastation, I was truly surprised to find that fifty years of battling Godzilla didn't leave them ready for this upstart. In the end, the Americans had to come up with a plan that was straight out of every Godzilla ever made: convince the two monsters to fight to the death.

I knew going in that there were two ways this movie could go. Either it was going to be one of the worst things I'd ever seen, or it was going to be so hilariously awful I would love it. I decided to bet on the latter and went ahead and bought a copy (it turned out to be sold out at Best Buy, and listed as "very long wait" on Netflix, but Amazon took care of me). With Lorenzo Lamas and Debbie Gibson leading the cast, we weren't looking at heavy duty acting chops, but I have to say Gibson did surprisingly well, especially having to carry the movie herself. There were plenty of hilariously awful moments, like the shark eating the Golden Gate Bridge, leaping hundreds of feet into the air to destroy a 747, and even chasing down and devouring a submarine. At one point, they clocked it's speed at an astounding five-hundred knots!

It was a hysterical thrill ride, from one mind-blowing impossiblity to the next. The science was so wrong I'm pretty sure I suffered a minor stroke. Dustin summed up much of it's awesome with:

Also, it sets new standards in the fields of "Stock Footage Usage", "Scale Discontinuity", "Set Design", "Debbie Gibson Usage", "Staring Out to Sea in Ponderous Reflection".

If the title grabbed you, I highly recomend checking it out. It is, quite simply, the single greatest giant shark and giant octopus movie staring Debbie Gibson ever made. Check out the trailer: