You know how, when you see a commercial for a fast food restaurant, and they show their flagship burger in a near-pornographic glamour shot of greasy, glistening beef, sweat-beaded tomatoes, and gobs of special sauce running over the edges, and then you go and order one and it looks like it’s been kept warm by having a fat, sweaty carnival ride attendant sit on it for four hours? That’s something like the experience you’ll get watching this movie.
Debbie Gibson further embarrasses herself (what, making bad pop music isn’t embarrassing enough?) as Emma, a marine biologist doing…something in the Arctic with her assistant Vince, in what is easily the world’s first TARDIS mini-sub. Seriously, it’s a normal mini sub outside, but when you see Emma and Vince sitting in the cabin it looks like they’re hanging out in my living room with a couple of video game joysticks to represent the controls. Anyway, some army dudes are also up there doing…something (we never really have any good reason for anything happening in this movie) with sonar, and it causes an avalanche of ice that unleashes the titular monsters.
The shark heads for the California coast and starts eating boats (and in one of the movie’s few money shots that actually pay off, leaping thousands of feet into the air to take down an airliner), while the octopus makes for Japan to destroy oil rigs. Emma and her old professor Lamar Sanders team up with Japanese scientist Seiji Shimada and U.S. Navy (or Marines, or some damn thing, I don’t think we’re ever really clear what he’s supposed to do, aside from black ops) jackass Allan Baxter to find a way to stop the monsters. When attempts to capture the beasts fail, it’s decided that since they’re mortal enemies, they could be lured together in order to kill each other.
I know that sounds cool, but keep in mind this movie was made for couch-cushion change by The Asylum, current reigning kings of gods-awful direct-to-video garbage. While the CG effects are probably better than could reasonably be expected from such a studio, the movie was still clearly made not by people who take their love of silly monster movies seriously, but by people who figure, “Eh, if we make some shitty cheap horror movies some idiot will put them on his Netflix list or be stupid enough to actually buy a copy eventually”. Thankfully I fall into the first category, and on a free trial to boot, so I didn’t waste any actual money on this load.
Even the worst of the '50s giant monster movies have some glimmer of entertainment, because they were so serious and straightforward and innocent. This flick, while thankfully not trying to be clever and self-referential (hands down the worst thing that has ever happened to our beloved genre, with a few brightly shining exceptions), does try a little too hard for the WTF factor. Dialog like “It rises!” and “Now if we don't find the bible means of stopping this fucker, sharkzilla is gonna own the seas”, while no doubt trying to recapture the doofy fun of those old movies, just feels forced and stale.
The one truly mind-boggling thing about this movie is its total lack of a sense of scale. The octopus is just a run-of-the-mill giant octopus, which reaches a recorded maximum length of about 23 feet, and the shark is identified as a Carcharodon megalodon, which was presumed to grow to about 60 feet long. When they break out of the ice, shown in scale with Emma’s mini sub, the shark is about the right size, and the octopus is as big as the shark. While 60 feet is a helluva lot bigger than the biggest octopus recorded, it’s not completely ridiculous.
However, later in the movie, we see the shark take a Sea Wolf-class nuclear submarine in its mouth, and the sub is approximately as long as the shark’s mouth is wide. Now, here’s where this movie wins the award for most batshit insane scale continuity fuck up in the history of movies. The shark measurements here are an approximation, but they’re close enough to give you an idea. A great white shark (which is a pretty good analog for a megalodon), has a mouth width of about 2.33 feet, and a body length of about 18 feet, meaning the jaw width is about 12.94% of its total body length. A Sea Wolf-class nuclear sub is 353 feet long. Using the same measurements, by the end of the movie the shark has grown from its normal 60 feet to an utterly ridiculous 2,727 feet long! The fucking shark is OVER HALF A GODDAMN MILE LONG! I’ve seen a lot of goofy shit in my time, but if anyone thinks they can find a continuity error that even comes close to matching this one in sheer absurdity, I’d love to hear about it.
The Moral of the Story: Filmmakers take note, not all seafaring vehicles are the same size. It takes all of five seconds to look their not-at-all-classified measurements up and realize the stupid mistake you are about to make.
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