Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus

Every now and then, you watch a movie which manages to transcend its medium, one that illustrates dimly understood facets of the human condition and makes you feel a richer person for having seen it. Most of the time, though, you end up watching something like Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.

Oceanographer Emma (Debbie Gibson) borrows a mini-sub from her employer in California to watch a pod of whales off the coast of Alaska. That mini-sub has a heckuva range. While there, she witnesses a relatively worthless military experiment testing new sonar equipment. This causes a glacier to calve, and frees two creatures frozen there for millions of years. If you were paying attention to the title of the movie, you already know the creatures are a Mega Shark (Megalodon Carcharodon) and a Giant Octopus (Completelyus Madeupus). They wander off in search of mischief. Apparently, in dinosaur times, freezing didn’t hurt seafood as much.

The two big critters engage in a variety of hijinks. The shark leaps out of the water to eat a jet liner flying over the ocean, I assume at 30,000 feet. What a jumper! The shark also eats a battleship the movie calls a destroyer despite the destroyer/battleship valiantly firing in the wrong direction. The octopus eats an oil platform, hopefully with the head of BP on board. Pretty soon, the government decides they’ve had enough of this and a task force led by Allan (Lorenzo Lamas, looking a little embarrassed by the movie) is composed to stop the creatures. They decide they can’t do the job without Emma, even though Emma doesn’t seem knowledgeable enough to tell a squid from a fish stick. A lot of time is spent on multiple scenes of Ms. Gibson looking wistfully out to sea, trying to spot where her career has drifted, I suppose.

It takes them a long time to figure out the answer to their problems is in a law of entertainment first formulated, I believe, by the great William Shakespeare: If you have two monsters in the same movie, they will fight each other. Eventually, they figure it out and the movie ends.

The CGI for this movie is about on par with a computer game circa 1995, and the script is far below the SyFy Channel’s dubious standards. The acting rarely rises to adequate. Watch this one to mock, and for no other purpose.

There is one great moment, when Lorenzo Lamas asks Debbie Gibson “How will it feel to have a career and then be washed up?” I think Debbie knows the answer to that one.
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