MEGA SHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS (2009) **
The hype has been building on Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus for a while now. Some have been calling it the next Snakes on a Plane. Others have been saying it’s nothing but a shitty movie with a great title. The truth is somewhere in between though.
When the government tests out some super-secret sonar device, it causes a prehistoric Mega Shark (Mega Shark, starring as himself) and a Giant Octopus (played by Giant Octopus) to thaw out of the Arctic ice. Former teen sensation Debbie Gibson (I refuse to call her DEBORAH Gibson because that’s like calling Marky Mark “Mark Wahlberg” or something) stars as a marine biologist who teams up with Lorenzo Lamas to stop the two humongous beasties from destroying oil rigs and battleships. When conventional weapons prove to be useless, Debbie decides to make the pair of prehistoric monsters fight each other.
Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus doesn’t take itself too seriously (which is a good thing) but I really wish it would’ve upped the ante when it came to the jaw-dropping batshit insane moments. There was only ONE such scene in the whole film, and I was hoping there would be at least four or five. That one scene is a doozy though. Mega Shark jumps out of the ocean and catches an airplane in its mouth like a dog catching a Frisbee. The initial goofiness of this scene made me laugh, but I started to really bust a gut when I realized that most commercial airliners fly at about 30,000 feet. Just the fact that Mega Shark could jump out of the water is funny enough (“It rises!”), but jumping 30,000 feet out of the water is just too fucking nuts for words. Although Mega Shark does use his jumping ability to take down the Golden Gate Bridge later in the movie, the effect was so expensive that they could only show it for about three seconds. Bummer.
Besides that one classic airplane scene, there was only one other moment of truly awful unintentional humor that gave me a good chuckle. That was when the subtitles kept saying, “Treasure Island Base” in three consecutive scenes and the action had never shifted away to anywhere else. Sadly, the rest of the flick isn't "So bad it's good"; it's just plain bad.
Ironically, the worst part of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus is actually the climatic battle between Mega Shark and Giant Octopus. The CGI effects are ridiculously shoddy and would’ve been a lot more fun had they have been old school rubber animatronics. The fight also suffers from some horrible continuity blunders (Mega Shark bites off several of Giant Octopus’s tentacles only to have them miraculously reappear in the next shot) and a decidedly weak finish. (SPOILER: It’s a tie.)
The good news is that Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus has some of the funniest dialogue you’ll hear all year. Debbie gets some good lines, especially when she sasses her old professor (“You’re the ex-Navy paleontologist guru, you tell me!”) or gazes in awe at the ocean (“There’s poetry here!”). I also liked some of the professor’s lines too like, “After being frozen for millions of years, you’d be horny too!”, but hands down the best line of dialogue came from Debbie’s boyfriend who gets all choked up while talking about his family: “My family were fishermen. We lived on the water. We lived… BECAUSE of the water!”