Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus Review
I am a strong proponent of the fact that a movie can be so bad it’s good. By this, I mean a movie can be so awful that we have a wonderful time laughing at it, not with it. Take “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes,” for example, or even “The Gods Must be Crazy,” to some extent. These movies often become cult favorites – things we watch over and over just because of how bad they are. Then, there are bad movies that are just plain boring. “Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus” is one of those.
“Mega Shark” became an internet sensation when the trailer launched for this direct to video release. People began to clamor for it – after all, how could it go wrong when it actually has a shark jumping out of the water and eating an airplane. It was ridiculous and over the top. It had such a making of the “it’s so bad, it’s good,” cult potential, that it took about a month for it to become available for me on Netflix.
And then I watched the film – all of it. Frankly, this film was best left alone as a trailer. Pretty much every ridiculous effect/scene was shown in the minute long trailer. The other 89 minutes were spent with some combination of the four main characters talking. Often, they were spouting nonsense about environmental issues and sounded like they were quoting Wikipedia. Not once did any of the issues have anything to do with the movie at hand. The acting was bad, but it wasn’t even bad enough to be funny. It just plodded along, incorporating weird transition effects into montages (and too many montages at that).
Most unfortunately, it wouldn’t have taken much of an effort to push this film into the awfully funny status. A shark attacking a plane was a step in the right direction. As was the clearly fake giant fin that is supposed to keep moving closer to its battleship target, (and in true low budget fashion the same awful shot is used countless times in a row – always with the ship the same distance from the fin). These potentially funny moments were even too few and far between. There were at least a dozen pointless conversations that took place on a beach with the water (and its sailboats, surfers, etc.) in the background. How simple would it have been to have a clearly fake tentacle destroy a boat in every one of these scenes – without our scientists ever noticing while they discuss the fact that they have no way of finding the monsters? And yet, they just talked and talked and talked…
“Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus,” is a poor attempt at making a funny bad film. There were hardly any “groan out loud” moments characteristic of this genre. The film took itself too seriously and that just can’t happen in a movie with this title. As a trailer, it was wonderful. It had the right mixture of ridiculous effects and over-the-top humor. As a film, well, there’s not much reason to even review it.
