When is a B-Movie not a B-Movie? When it's a cleverly marketed viral with additional shit packed in to force it up to feature-length. If you were expecting a witty punchline to my first question: I apologise. I don't feel much like joking when I've just been robbed of my precious time. But at least this opening may be in some way fitting. It could give you an idea of how I felt when
Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus dashed my expectations of a tasty morsel of schlock action silliness. From the number of
hits the trailer for this movie got on YouTube, I'm guessing that most of you will have heard of this film. If not, the plot is simply that deep-sea diver Emma MacNeil (
Deborah Gibson) witnesses a massive prehistoric shark and a massive prehistoric octopus suddenly defrost from an iceberg, reanimate and start rampaging across the world's oceans. Understandably distraught, but nonetheless sympathetic to all living creatures, MacNeil searches for her radical old science professor Lamar Sanders (
Sean Lawlor) and begins her attempts to stop them. On the way she talks a whole bunch of gibberish, fucks a fellow scientist from Japan, and tries to act surprised at invisible CGI tentacles. Now, before you start typing indignant comments about me being snobbish about something clearly advertised as a corny, low-budget B-Move let me outline the main reasons why this movie is terrible... The trailer looks awesome because the octopus and the shark wreak low-budget carnage. Simple, stupid, fun carnage like the shark leaping from the ocean to devour a jet. Then they have a big fight. A big, silly, graphically challenged fight. That, for me, was the draw. I wanted another
D-War, another carefree, plotless festival of silliness. What I got was 85 minutes of boring chatter and terrible acting punctuated by scenes I'd already been shown in the trailer. In fact, by the end, I'd noticed footage of the CGI shark and octopus from earlier in the film being re-used. That was a bitter pill to swallow. So where should a B-movie go when the lo-fi fun is gone? Laughable dialogue! Quotable one-liners of immense absurdity that would be ashamed to appear in a Bay bonanza. Sadly,
Mega Swindle vs Giant Rip-Off had no such lines. Admittedly some of the attempts at science made me chuckle, particularly a montage sequence of experiments leading to the realisation that these beasts could be attracted by sex pheromones (which are apparently luminous). But on the whole, characters were too annoying to be funny. I was more inclined to throw a shoe at the screen than to laugh. The primary reason for this was that their remit was to waste time in between the sparse scenes of mega-violence. The result is that any humour to be found within the corniness of the dialogue is quickly lost in the huge swathes of boredom that follow as you wait, seemingly forever, for the action to start. What's more, every moment of violence is encased within endless scenes of actors stumbling around as the obliging cameraman builds up biceps to die for by repeatedly shaking his camera around the set. So the problem with this film is not its poor quality, lame Z-list celebrity resuscitations (Debbie Gibson takes the lead, supported by
Lorenzo Lamas and his terrible, inexplicable pony tail) or 1990s graphics. It is that it is not a B-Movie at all. Sure, B-Movies were made on the cheap, but still their aims were to let aspiring, enthusiastic directors show what they can do and provide some mindless entertainment for us movie-lovers.
Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus is not there for either. It's a despicable attempt to cash in on our penchant for the retro and our susceptibility to viral marketing. So please, friends, join me in heckling these money-grabbing bastards. One-two-three: BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!