rating: 
company: The Asylum
year: 2009
runtime: 88′
country: United States
director: Jack Perez (as Ace Hannah)
cast: Deborah (Debbie) Gibson, Vic Chao,
Sean Lawlor, Lorenzo Lamas
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There are moments when I can’t help but wonder why I do the things I do. The readership of this site is far too low for fame, fortune, or glory to be involved – some kind of depraved subconscious masochistic desire seems much more likely. Sitting through the likes of MONSTER A-GO-GO or WEASELS RIP MY FLESH makes a certain amount of sense for someone in my position since, awful as they may be, they still fit comfortably within the fringes of my bizarre taste. That I subject myself, time and again, to the output of The Asylum [the cinematic equivalent of sucking a tail pipe] is more difficult to understand.
Asylum has taken to referring the majority of its direct-to-video tumors as “mockbusters”, going so far as to recommend them as gag gifts for cinephiles. The company has carved a profitable little niche for itself by producing knock-off titles [THE DAY THE EARTH STOPPED, INVASION OF THE POD PEOPLE, TRANSMORPHERS, THE DA VINCI TREASURE . . . need I go on?] that are typically sitting on video store shelves before their super-budget inspirations even hit the big screen, with SciFi Channel more than happy to premiere whatever swill Asylum sends its way. That there’s a market for lousy DTV efforts is all well and good, but does it have to be this bad?
MEGA SHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS seemed a bit more tongue-in-cheek than its predecessors, at least in concept. In practice, it’s just more of the same old, same old, only produced with even less talent or conviction.
In spite of the sensational title, the story for MSVGO is about people – four people, to be precise. Emma [Debbie Shake Your Love Gibson] is the noble scientist type, and distrusting of “the Government” and anyone in a suit. She really likes whales – so much that we see the same shot of one approaching her submarine five or six times. While out on a jaunt in a stolen sub from “the Institute” where she works, Emma witnesses a super-secret sonar experiment [conducted from what looks to be a traffic chopper] that causes a glacier to explode, unleashing Giant Octopus and Mega Shark. Back on the mainland she continues her work for “the Institute” by investigating the death of a beached whale that has huge and obvious bite marks on it. She pulls a tooth from the carcass, but is fired before she can analyze it at the labs at “the Institute”.
Convinced that “the Government” is up to something suspicious and that “the Feds” are following her [we never see anybody], Emma meets up with her former professor and recovering alcoholic friend Lamar [Lawlor], who just happens to be a government distrusting, Institute defying expert in all things oceanic. After a montage of him poking at Emma’s sample and pouring stuff from one test tube to another, he determines that the tooth belongs to one Carcharadon megalodon – a humongous prehistoric shark. That evening he gets a call from Japanese scientist Shimada [Chao], who flies out to San Francisco to meet up with Emma and Lamar. It seems that an oil platform in the Pacific Ocean was destroyed by a monster, and Shimada [concerned that "the Government" is covering up the truth] is hoping Lamar and Emma can help him figure out what did it. Given that sketches from the only survivor of the incident depict a giant octopus, they decide that the culprit is a giant octopus.
Once the tedious science stuff is out of the way, “the Feds” burst into Lamar’s pad and kidnap the group to a naval base, which is under the control of Allan [Lamas]. Just why Allan is in charge of anything when his think tank looks to have been lost in action long ago is never satisfactorily explained. He tells the scientists that all traditional methods employed by “the Government” to destroy Mega Shark and Giant Octopus have failed, leaving him no choice but to consult people who might have better ideas. Unfortunately the scientists don’t have better ideas, and their horrible schemes to control Mega Shark and Giant Octopus by using pheromones to bait them into hugely populated areas [San Francisco and Tokyo in this case] are put into action.
For those who ever wondered what would happen if Debbie Gibson were put in charge of national security, MSVGO gives us the answer – thousands of people would die, and probably at the hands of a shark the size of Rhode Island. We never see the thousands of people dying in San Francisco, though Mega Shark does take a bite out of the Golden Gate Bridge and eat library footage of a Destroyer. Giant Octopus apparently gets into similar trouble in Tokyo, though we don’t get to see any of that either. After the two disastrous failures the scientists change their plans, this time using the pheromones they created to lure Mega Shark and Giant Octopus into a death battle in unpopulated waters. This plan is more of a success, even though thousands of people still die in the process. Mega Shark and Giant Octopus fight and, in the middle of fighting, die. I don’t know how they die – we cut from footage of the two fighting to the cast hooraying that the monsters are dead, which cuts to a shot of the two sinking to the ocean floor. The film concludes with the three scientists on the beach receiving a report of more monsters on the loose – the end?
MEGA SHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS is bad – very very bad. Before anyone chastises me for not “getting” that it was supposed to be bad, trust me – I get it. But this goes well beyond the pale, driving viewers to the point of distraction with its uncompromising awfulness. The wink wink, nudge nudge, “we meant to make it this way” pandering at The Asylum website doesn’t even begin to account for it.
The scripting by director Jack Perez [under pseudonym Ace Hannah] doesn’t even strive to be perfunctory, offering up a garbled mish-mash of cancerous exposition, homages, and cliches. His direction fares, if possible, worse. A moment early on tells the whole story here – Debbie Gibson looks out the view-port of her submarine and lamely announces, “There’s poetry here . . .” before we are deluged with travelogue footage of the ocean floor. More annoying is the editing by Marq Morrison and Serjio Rios, which consists of stopping the film dead with desaturated freeze-frames at every available opportunity. Think of the whiteout transitions in INDEPENDENCE DAY – now imagine if they had been implanted in the middle of virtually every shot in the film and you’ll have some idea of MSVGO’s montage style. At first it’s just obnoxious, but by the time the first half hour is through it starts to really, physically hurt.
Performances are, in a word, awful. How Debbie Gibson, who has apparently done pretty well for herself on Broadway, got dragged into this is beyond me. And those hoping for an on-screen disrobing a la the March 2005 issue of Playboy will be sorely disappointed – there is a sex scene of sorts, but any interesting action is, as is the case with the rest of the film, kept off screen. Sean Lawlor fumbles his attempts to sound Irish [did I mention his character was Irish, and continually refers to Gibson as "lassie"?] while Vic Chao just tries his best not to giggle during his lines. Lorenzo Lamas is another beast all together – how anything so talentless could have sprouted from the fertile genes of Arlene Dahl and Fernando Lamas is a mystery for the ages.
Then there are the all-important special effects. The computer animation used to bring Mega Shark and Giant Octopus to life is far worse than what has become the standard for DTV efforts, and well below the sunken bar of my expectations. The budget for MSVGO seems to have been so paltry that only a couple of minutes of CG animation could be produced, with the editors repeating the shots ad nauseum [sometimes flipped, sometimes not] to give the illusion that they had more to work with. They didn’t, and it stinks. It takes missteps of epic proportions to ruin the potential entertainment value of a movie featuring a shark capable of catching jet airplanes at altitude, but The Asylum certainly manages to.
Those who go into MSVGO expecting something along the lines of the KING KONG VS. GODZILLA of straight-to-video crap will be disappointed. Then again, those who go into it expecting much of anything probably will be as well. You’ll know already if MSVGO is the kind of thing you’re into [given that The Asylum continues to make money, you have to be out there somewhere] and nothing I’ve said here will change the fact that you’re going to see it. Others should stay as far away as possible. Just watch the trailer – it showcases all of the good bits anyway.
