47 Meters Down

Director: Johannes Roberts
Writers: Johannes Roberts, Ernest Fiera
Producers: James Harris, Mark Lane
Cast: Claire Holt, Mandy Moore, Matthew Modine
Country: UK
Year of release: 2016
Reviewed from: trade screening

Following hot on the heels of The Other Side of the Door (due to the vagaries of distribution schedules) comes Johannes Roberts’ tenth feature, and arguably his best. 47 Meters Down takes a very simple premise and runs with it, to genuinely terrifying effect.

Claire Holt (The Vampire Diaries) and Mandy Moore (Tangled) are sisters Kate and Lisa. The former is the wild, free-living, risk-taking, not-settling-down type; the latter is the sensible one in a long-term relationship. Which has just ended unhappily, the unseen Stuart accusing Lisa of being boring. A holiday in Mexico with her sister should offer some solace but also a chance for Lisa to show Stuart that she’s more free-spirited than he gave her credit for.

Which is why, after a night of drinking and dancing with two local lads, the girls agree to a trip out to sea for a shark cage-based close encounter. Matthew Modine (The Haunting of Radcliffe House) is Taylor, skipper of the unprepossessing boat with its rusty cage and creaking winch. This is very much not an approved, certificated tourist excursion and Lisa has qualms about both the sharks and the operation, which Kate allays through sisterly – but irresponsible – persuasion.

Inside the cage, lowered to a depth of five metres, the sisters have some stunning but scary views of great whites, attracted by a chum bucket of offal. And thus we come to the end of act one and the predictable cable snap, sending the cage down to the titular depth.

So here’s the predicament. Kate (an experienced scuba diver) and Lisa (new to the underwater realm) are in a rusty cage, surrounded by assorted pieces of broken winch, with a limited air supply – reducing even faster than normal because of their panicked state. The blue water above them has at least two enormous sharks swimming around in it, and a dash for the surface is out of the question because they would get the bends. You don’t really want a slow ascent with a five-minute pause halfway when huge predators are circling.

Can Taylor and his Mexican crew get to them? Can they even be trusted to try, given the dodgy nature of the enterprise? No-one else knows the girls even went out on this boat. Also, they are just out of radio range, which means intermittent communication with Taylor is only possible by briefly swimming up a few metres. So if the boat did decide to leave, they wouldn’t even know.

Roberts and his regular co-writer Ernest Riera wring every ounce of nerve-shredding tension out of this situation. The ticking clock of the air supply, the uncertain reliability of the boat crew and their equipment, the ever-present threat of the great whites. This is an extraordinarily scary, claustrophobic film and one that will have you on the edge of your seat, alternately gasping and whimpering.

The relationship between the sisters is well-defined and it’s to the film’s credit that Ernest and Jo felt no need to include any sort of “I slept with your boyfriend” revelation. There’s enough going on here without adding relationship woes, and besides the sisters’ only chance of survival is working together and helping each other.

And yet, in a sense, there’s relatively little going on here. There are several action sequences, such as a trip across the ocean floor to retrieve a flashlight, but it is surprising at the end of the film to realise quite how few and far between are the actual appearances by any sharks. And that’s a Good Thing. It is the threat of the sharks that drives the terror of both characters and audience. When a shark does appear it’s swift and sudden and terrifying but much, much more than a simple, cheesy cat-scare. That’s what sharks do – they swim fast through the opaque water, suddenly appearing with mouths full of “many teeth, dear”. (Although, despite what that song claims, sharks are not known for their dental hygiene. They don’t really need to, given that they have multiple rows of teeth, constantly moving forward to replace lost ones.)

Putting today’s marine biology lesson aside, what impresses – really impresses – is Jo’s direction. For most of the film he has only two characters, in a single tight location, their faces partially obscured (fortunately they have different hair colours and outfits), their surrounding environment an amorphous haze and no actual sharks on screen. Yet the film remains visually gripping, a situation greatly assisted by the frankly awesome cinematography of underwater specialist Mark Silk.

Now, there have been a lot of dumb shark films made in recent years. If you’re not sure quite how many, take a look at the three-part blog I wrote for Hemlock Books last year here, here and here – and bear in mind that this is already out-of-date, failing to include such low-grade tripe as Shark Exorcist, Sharkenstein and Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre (no, seriously). 47 Meters Down belongs to that much rarer cinematic subgenre, the intelligent shark movie. This is a film that doesn’t have to actually show the sharks to be scary; not because of any fear of audiences seeing through the effects, it should be stressed. The great whites seen here (and indeed all other passing fish) are completely credible, authentic-looking CGI creations.

47 Meters Down proves that it is possible to make a genuinely frightening, serious, intelligently plotted, shark-based horror movie. In fact, I would venture to suggest that this is probably the best shark movie since Jaws – and certainly the scariest. There have been a handful of other intelligent shark movies but none of those have milked the horror potential of the subgenre as successfully as this picture.

Interestingly, the film this most closely resembles isn’t a shark film, it’s The Descent – and not just because of the female cast (discussion of the errant ex-boyfriend notwithstanding, this has no problem passing the Bechdel test). In a review of The Descent in Video Watchdog, which I quoted in my book Urban Terrors, it was noted that the film featured hot actresses in skin-tight outfits yet pointedly refused to objectify them. 47 Meters Down achieves the same laudable goal, avoiding the same easy win.

More than its gender credentials, Roberts’ film resembles Neil Marshall’s in its claustrophobia – the cage is a tiny haven of safety among the blue – and in the way that the situation gets progressively worse, danger piling on additional danger as vestiges of hope are dashed away in gut-wrenching succession. Marshall’s six women were trapped underground by a cave-in and nobody knew they were there and there were subhuman crawlers hunting them down. Jo’s two sisters are trapped at the bottom of the sea and nobody knows they’re there (except Matthew Modine and his crew of questionable honesty) and there are some 20-feet long specimens of Carcharodon carcharias prowling around.

There is also, like The Descent, [spoilers on] a ‘false rescue’, somewhat unsubtly presaged with a Chekhov’s gun comment from Taylor about the danger of nitrogen narcosis-induced hallucination. While it’s apparent, as we watch the sisters make it back to the boat with a good 20 minutes to run, that this isn’t real (unless the film has an extraordinarily lengthy credit crawl…), that doesn’t in any way distract from the very real terror of their ascent and their struggle to make it on board, which is one of the most seat-grippingly scary sequences in the whole movie. A coda of Mexican coastguard divers finally arriving provides the sort of upbeat ending that US audiences (or at least, US distributors) demand. But by fading to black before the surface is reached, Jo allows us to retain the very real possibility that this too is inside our heroine’s mind and no more real than the previous escape. Thus the film offers both the ‘real world trap condenses into mind trap’ existentialist nihilism of The Descent’s original ending, and also the pat ‘with one bound she was free’ resolution of The Descent’s American ending [spoilers off] for those who want it.

And, like The Descent, one watches this film thinking: “Why in God’s name would you even do that?” Why would anyone in their right mind go potholing? Why would anyone with any sense get into a shark cage, even a good one booked through a legitimate tour operator? I mean, I love sharks as much as the next man (a shout out here to Bite-Back, the shark conservation charity which thoroughly deserves your support) but if I want to get up close to them I can do that at the Sea Life Centre, thank you very much. Their glass tunnel is completely safe, requires no specialised equipment or training – and there’s a gift shop at the far end of it. That’s the sensible option right there.

Of course, if Kate and Lisa had sensibly decided not to go out on Taylor’s boat, there would have been no movie. Or, looked at another way, the movie would have been 90 minutes of Mandy Moore and Claire Holt sunning themselves by a pool. Which, now I think about, you know, would also have worked for me…

Produced by the ‘Tea Shop and Film Company’ duo of James Harris and Mark Lane (Tower Block, Cockneys vs Zombies) for Dimension Films, some of the underwater scenes were shot in a big tank at Pinewood Studios. Exteriors and surface shots were filmed in July/August 2015 in the more glamorous locale of the Dominican Republic where this was the first production in the big new water tank facility there. Although one might assume that the nominal stars don't actually appear too much after act one, aside from close-ups where you can see their faces, and perhaps spent much of the shoot warm and dry in an ADR studio. in fact both actresses spent a lot of time in the water, for which props should undoubtedly be given. Nevertheless, credit where it’s due so a tip of the hat also to ‘dive doubles’ Zoe Masters, Elspeth Rodgers and Jenny Stock (I think there was a fourth dive double, but only those three are listed on the IMDB). Only in a couple of shots are the 'actors' as CGI as the sharks and you won't spot those.

Tower Block director James Nunn was first AD, a duty he also performed on F (as well as numerous other BHR titles) and also shot second unit. A terrific score by North American duo tomanandy (Sinister 2, Resident Evil sequels) keeps the atmosphere charged throughout, abetted by corking sound design by Alex Joseph (Tower Block, Green Street 3). Production design by David Bryan (The Other Side of the Door), make-up effects by Kristyan Mallett (Howl), editing by Martin Brinkler (Storage 24) – all top-notch. Outpost FX were responsible for the absolutely enormous amounts of visual effects; basically everything underwater except actors, cage and props is created in a computer while lots of other CGI disguises the fact that this was all shot in, effectively, a big swimming pool.

During post-production the title was briefly changed to In the Deep and that was on the print which was screened (twice) at Cannes in May 2016 (actually it was Johannes Roberts’ In the Deep, but who could begrudge him the possessory credit?). However it has subsequently been confirmed that the film will revert to the shooting title (with that American spelling) on release, probably to avoid confusion with a US-Aussie film called Into the Deep, set for a UK DVD release in September. That is also about people trapped in a shark cage but it looks like a found footage movie (yawn) and so probably not something we need to concern ourselves with and certainly no real competition except among that key audience demographic, people who don’t pay attention when buying DVDs in Asda. The IMDB currently lists a Dutch release date of September 2016 for 47 Meters Down but who knows where they got that from or how accurate it is.

MJS rating: A

Sharktopus

Director: Declan O’Brien
Writer: Mike MacLean
Producers: Roger Corman, Julie Corman
Cast: Eric Roberts, Sara Malakul Lane, Kerem Bursin
Country: USA
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: screener (Anchor Bay)

I really wanted to enjoy Sharktopus more than I did, which was ‘not very much’. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that this is a bad film. Well, let me qualify that slightly. Sharktopus is indeed a bad film but it’s not an insultingly stupid, lazy and inept film. This screener turned up in the same post as Stonehenge Apocalypse and, while I confidently expect that I will never, ever watch either film again, I know which I would plump for if offered this limited choice while strapped into a chair with my eyes held open like Malcolm McDowell.

Although that is partly because, in such a situation, sleep would be difficult but I could reasonably count on Sharktopus to make me nod off, even with eyelid braces in place. I fell asleep twice while trying to sit through this film, and it’s not particularly long. It’s just not gripping at all. I didn’t at any point care what was happening or worry about what might happen next. And call me Mr Fussy-Socks but when I sit down to watch a film about a monster with rows of teeth, lots of tentacles and a list of favourite foods which starts ‘1. People standing next to hot women in bikinis. 2. Hot women in bikinis.’ then I expect to find myself taking an interest in proceedings. Is that too much to ask?

I may be speculating wildly here - actually there’s no ‘may’, this is just pure speculation - but I envisage Sharktopus as Roger Corman’s answer to The Asylum. Corman was the King of the Bs for so long; folk like Charlie Band and Uncle Lloyd established their own distinctive niches but never came close to challenging for the throne. Then those rootin’ tootin’ Asylum boys moseyed into town and swiftly staked out a claim as purveyors of finest grade, hugely enjoyable, cut-price cinematic tat.

After making their name - establishing their brand identity, if you will - with a series of insane (and sometime insanely cheeky) ‘mockbusters’, The Asylum really announced their entry into the original creature feature market with the utterly bonkers, utterly brilliant Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus.

I can just imagine Corman, sat in his office, looking at how many hits the Mega-Shark vs trailer had received on YouTube, and plotting his counter-attack. If people want a film about a shark and an octopus, how about a film about something which is both shark and octopus? An, if you will, sharktopus? Not only would this be something new and original, something unique and distinctive, but it also saves money by requiring only one piss-poor CGI creature instead of two. ‘Ker-ching’ go the dollar-signs in the producer’s eyes.

Or maybe he just had a bad dream. Or maybe he was doodling during a dull conference call and found he had sketched a shark with octopus tentacles. Who knows?

I just wish that, having conceived this absolutely insane, loopily brilliant idea, Corman and co. had done something with it. But no. It’s half-shark, half-octopus and it kills people. That’s pretty much the extent of the plot.

In the opening scene, two young women in bikinis are sunbathing on the beach at Santa Monica. Actually, before we get to them there is a good minute or two of establishing stock footage of attractive young people in beachwear doing beach things like sunbathing, swimming, playing volleyball, eating ice creams etc. This is a recurring motif throughout the film. Excepting the bits of the film which actually take place out at sea on boats, no scene is allowed to start without a chunk of bikini-packed stock beach footage.

Fred Olen Ray once famously observed that “nudity is the cheapest special effect” but actually I think that - assuming this stuff was sitting on a shelf in Corman’s offices and not specially shot by sending an intern down to the beach with a domestic camcorder - the cheapest special effect can now be officially recognised as stock footage of women in bikinis. I don’t know how long Sharktopus would be without all this padding but it might have difficulty making feature-length.

Anyway, one of these women goes swimming and is chased by the world’s least realistic shark fin in a scene which steals everything from the equivalent bit of Jaws except the music, the quality and the technical and artistic skill. Her friend screams quite half-heartedly to look out but no-one else on the beach pays attention because they are all stock footage, and there’s no-one else in the water either (except in all the establishing shots).

Just as the shark (it looks like it’s supposed to be a mako, but that’s more likely coincidence than planned detail) is about to grab the girl, it is itself grabbed by a thing which is basically the front half of a great white and the back half of an abnormally large giant pacific octopus (with some extra spiky-quill things sticking out of its gill slits because obviously just a run-of-the-mill shark/octopus hybrid wouldn’t be scary enough). Oh, and it has a sort of electronic doodad strapped to its back like the sort of frickin’ laser beam that Dr Evil insisted on attaching to his own sharks.

Except that this is not a frickin’ laser beam but some sort of control unit. For this is S11 (constantly pronounced “essleven”) a bioengineered weapon created by a company called Bluewater which consists of mad scientist Nathan Sands (the ever-reliable Eric Roberts: Sanctimony, Raptor, Endangered Species, The Shadow Men and of course the Doctor Who telemovie) and his sexy-nerdette daughter Nicole (Sara Malakul Lane, a British actress/model born and raised in Thailand, who was in a Steven Seagal film). They are, naturally, testing this highly dangerous creation not in a tank at some ocean research institute but in the surf off California’s most popular beach.

Sands is demonstrating S11 to Commander Cox (Calvin Persson) of the US Navy who seems to think that it is generally a good idea to employ tiny family businesses to somehow develop dangerous new breeds of marine life in the never-ending war against drug-runners and terrorists. Tragically, a further attempt to test S11 by nearly crashing it into some random dude’s motorboat causes the frickin’ laser beam box to get knocked off the creature’s back. And from then on it’s up to the Bluewater team to find and capture the creature as it makes its way down the coast to Mexico, where life is cheap and filming permits are cheaper.

Although the current Bluewater employee roster has only two names on it, there was a previous member of the team, Andy Flynn (Turkish-born Kerem Bursin making his feature debut after a few shorts) who helped to develop S11 but then left to put his scientific knowledge to better use by partying South of the Border. We meet him in a swimming pool, wearing a sombrero, playing drinking games with two non-speaking bit-part bimbos. Sands offers Flynn enough money to join the hunt for S11 and also gets along Flynn’s best buddy Santos (Julian Gonzalez, a prolific Spanish actor) who may or may not have previously worked for Bluewater.

Flynn was previously an item with Nicole and still fancies his chances but her heart belongs to Daddy - and to bioengineering. Santos, as a substantial supporting character with lots of dialogue but no significant character flaws, no romantic interest and no full name is instantly marked out as sharktopus-bait, though he does survive for most of the film.

So Nicole, Flynn and Santos set out on a small boat to track down the creature using Nicole’s laptop - somehow - while Sands Sr stays on a much larger boat, knocking back G&Ts provided by his one-man crew/staff and taking occasional video calls from Commander Cox. And now we have a succession of cameos in which we meet someone, they do something or say something - and then they get grabbed and eaten by S11. Repeat to fade. We’re never asked to care about or know these people - they’re just anonymous, one-note plot-fodder. It’s like watching a B-movie version of Casualty.

Actually the first taste of this is back in California where two guys painting the side of the Queen Mary discuss how they would prefer to die before being grabbed by CG tentacles. Then down Mexico way we have a guy on a yacht, a guy on a jet-ski... Sharktopus is an equal-opportunities carnivore and sometimes a woman gets it too. There’s a bikini-clad beachcomber whose metal detecting uncovers a massive gold medallion - moments before she is randomly grabbed and dragged into the sea, screamingly mildly. And there a bungee-jumping scene which seems to be there primarily in order to be included in the trailer.

Now, a word about the screaming. Back in the 1980s there were ladies called ‘scream queens’ - Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens, Michelle Bauer et al - and throughout the 1990s the term persisted, consistently devalued as more and more actresses, further and further down the sub-Hollywood ladder, started brandishing it about. I mention this because Sharktopus really, really needs some scream queens. I’ve never before watched a film where so many women screamed so half-heartedly. Oh dear, my boyfriend is being devoured by a hideous mutant creature right in front of my eyes and in all probability I’m next. Oh goodness, oh hellup, oh my.

One of the more interesting pieces of sharktopus-bait is a pirate radio DJ named Captain Jack (Ralph Garman, who does voices for Family Guy) who broadcasts from his yacht, assisted by a lithe but stand-off-ish babe called Stephie (Shandi Finnessey, who was Miss USA 2004) who, like almost all the women in this film, wears nothing except a string bikini and sunglasses. We meet these two a couple of times as Captain Jack reports disbelievingly on breaking stories of a shark-octopus monster attacking people up and down the Mexican coast.

The closest we actually get to a real supporting character (and the only woman apart from Nicole to not wear the otherwise obligatory four triangles and a few bits of string, is TV reporter Stacy Everheart (Liv Boughn, also in Corman’s Dinoshark!) who is desperate for a report that will not only make her career but save her job and thinks she might have found it. She is accompanied everywhere by her long-suffering cameraman Bones (the unconventionally alliterative Hector Jimenez, who was in environmentalist fantasy Christmas comedy Navidad SA) and finds her information source in a world-weary drunk named Pez (Blake Lindsey, who played a serial killing Johann Sebastian Bach in a very odd 2009 short) who claims to have seen the monster in all its gory glory.

In terms of a story, what we get is Nicole, Flynn and Santos looking for (and occasionally finding) the monster; Stacy, Bones and Pez looking for (and occasionally finding) the monster; and assorted, mostly nameless bit-parts not looking for (but invariably being found by) the monster. All those scenes have been put into a multi-disc DVD player and then someone, possibly Corman himself, has pressed the ‘shuffle’ button and called it a movie.

That’s actually truer than you might think because although there is some narrative progression in both the Nicole/Flynn/Santos storyline and the Stacy/Bones/Pez B-story, the movie has a typically Corman-esque attitude to continuity which is so cavalier that it wears a big floppy hat and lots of lace while fighting a losing battle against Parliamentary forces. There’s a sequence where Nicole, Flynn and Santos are joined by two other unnamed divers so that these two extras (who might as well wear red Star Fleet uniforms for all the hope they have of surviving) can join Flynn in an underwater battle against the beast.

But about ten minutes beforehand, when there is no-one in this (really very small) boat except the three regulars, a long-shot of the vessel skimming across the waves clearly shows five people on board.

The thing is: Roger Corman doesn’t care. Roger Corman already has your money (or at least, the distributor/broadcaster’s money) and he knows that there is an exact level of crappiness to aim for: no higher, no lower. Provided a film meets a minimum requirement (and regular followers of this site will realise that this is a low, low baseline) it can be as crappy as it wants in other ways. All sorts of corners can be cut without losing sales. And every dollar saved is an extra dollar of profit. That’s the Corman way.

Certainly no unnecessary money has been spent on the CGI creature which is desperately awful, not just in the tentacles which rise from the ocean waves, but also when seen in its entirety on land. (Did I mention that S11 can climb out of the sea and crawl around on land in exactly the way that neither sharks not octopuses can? No? Neither did the film-makers. It seems to be just an idea that they had halfway through production when they realised that they might need something with the approximate shape of a third act.)

Ooh, and that reminds me of another point. Everyone in this film uses the term ‘octopi’ in an attempt to sound clever and all scientific and shit. But the plural of octopus is octopodes, as any fule kno. (Yes, some dictionaries also list ‘octopi’ but that is because dictionaries record usage, they don’t dictate it. The suffix of the word is the Greek ‘-pus’ not the Latin ‘-us’ so it doesn’t pluralise like nautili, omnibi or diplodoci.)

There’s not a lot more to say about the plot of Sharktopus and certainly nothing more to be said about its characters, apart from the revelation that Sands Sr had somehow tampered with his daughter’s bioengineering software to make S11 even more deadly than planned and this is why it is attacking innocent Americans in Mexico. And not because, you know, it is an artificially created killing machine with rows of teeth, huge tentacles (which vary in length from scene to scene and have hard stabbing points just like octopus tentacles don’t) and a voracious appetite.

At this stage in the review I would normally list other cast members and what they have been in but hardly anyone in this film has any other credits. The only notable name is Mike Gaglio, a veteran of Fred Olen Ray movies and many other DTV titles who managed, within the space of about 18 months, to appear (uncredited) in this, in Asylum sequel Mega-Shark vs Crocosaurus and in Fred’s own Super Shark. Corman himself makes a cameo as a beach bum who calmly watches the metal-detecting babe get dragged into the sea and devoured.

Let’s instead take a look at director Declan O’Brien who started out as a stage actor in New York but switched to producing and directing when he moved out to Hollywood. He seems to be contentedly carving out a career shooting these Happy Shopper horrors, having written and/or directed Snakeman, Savage Planet, Harpies, Rock Monster, Monster Ark and Corman’s Roman epic Cyclops, also starring Eric Roberts. In 2009 he made Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead and is now helming another entry in that franchise (which should really be called Wrong Turn 4: Why Don’t We Stop and Ask Someone, although it probably won’t be).

The idea for Sharktopus originated with the SyFy Channel (so my theory about Corman reacting to The Asylum is completely wrong, but who cares?). The script was written by Mike MacLean, a High School teacher in Arizona who was approached by Corman based on some of his published crime fiction. Initially asked to work on Jim Wynorski’s Dinocroc vs Supergator script, MacLean also contributed to Road Raiders, the final film by Filipino legend Cirio Santiago which Wynorski completed before it fell into rights hell. MacLean, Wynorski and Corman are, as I type, collaborating on Piranhaconda, a creature which will probably have razor sharp pincers on its fins because a run-of-the-mill piranha/anaconda hybrid just wouldn’t be scary enough.

Tom Hiel composed the score, a gig he probably got because he worked with O’Brien on Rock Monster and Cyclops, rather than because he scored the mid-1990s crime caper Swimming with Sharks (although that may have helped...). He also contributed to Scary Movie 2, Christina Ricci werewolf bomb Cursed and the second and third Rugrats movies. The Sharktopus soundtrack also features a song by a band called the Cheater Whores who are the director’s nieces.

Cinematographer Santiago Navarrete was camera operator on Mexican-shot Hollywood pictures like The Mask of Zorro and Vampires: Los Muertos and also DPed a 1980 Mexican version of Jack the Ripper. Editor Vikram Kale has a portmanteau-named-monster-heavy CV that includes Dinoshark, Dinocroc and Supergator!

The VFX are credited to Dilated Pixels, whose other work includes giant bug movie Infestation and a Lord of the Rings video game. They do their best but the budget is small and the monster is dumb. At its heart, Sharktopus is an idea in search of a plot. Films like this often rip off the plots of bigger, better films so Sharktopus is to be commended for not being a blatant clone of something. On the other hand, a ripped-off plot might have given it more structure, form and interesting content.

As mentioned, Corman has also made Dinoshark and is working on Piranhaconda. Coming soon, no doubt, will be Dinoconda, Piranhopus, Crococonda, Piranhoshark, Octoconda...

Repeat to fade.

MJS rating: C
Review originally posted 5th April 2011.

Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus

Director: ‘Ace Hannah’
Writer: ‘Ace Hannah’
Producer: David Michael Latt
Cast: Deborah Gibson, Lorenzo Lamas, Vic Chao
Country: USA
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: UK DVD

website: www.theasylum.cc

Shark your love! Just can’t shark your love!

I would like to commence this review by giving props to former teen chanteuse Debbie Gibson who is surprisingly good in this film. The list of pop stars who have acted in SF/fantasy films is a long and largely inglorious one and Gibson’s acting career has not exactly been a string of hits. Wedding Band? Body/Antibody? Celeste in the City? Anyone heard of any of these?

Ironically, Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus, despite being the cheesiest, dumbest movie the woman has acted in to date (something I feel confident in saying, despite never having seen any of her other films) is undoubtedly her highest profile screen work. And the fact that she acquits herself well, bringing far more to her role than the script or the production values could ever justify, should lead on to bigger and better things.

Although, in the short term, all it seems to have lead to is The Asylum deciding that their next aquatic giant monster movie, Mega-Piranha, should star Tiffany. Good grief.

Gibson (who acts under the name Deborah but is prominently credited as Debbie on the UK sleeve) plays marine biologist Emma MacNeil. Even in her late thirties, she’s peppy and preppy but that’s all right because marine biologists are hot. Everyone knows this. Brinke Stevens has a degree in marine biology. I rest my case.

It is a well-known fact that all hot women with a professional interest in science are either astronomers or marine biologists. A mascara overdose aside, Gibson is credible in the role. Except when she’s piloting a mini-submarine.

MacNeil and her colleague Vince (Asylum regular Jonathan Nation: War of the Worlds 2, Death Racers, 2012: Doomsday, Dragonquest) are scooting around off the coast of Alaska in this mini-sub watching humpback whales, in fact steering right through the middle of a pod, which seems awfully dangerous. The whales are CGI but verisimilitude is added (or subtracted) by stock shots of seals and hammerhead sharks (despite the fact that all nine species of hammerhead live in tropical waters).

High above flies a small helicopter whose solo pilot (David Meador) releases some sort of experimental sonar device into the water. The problem with this sequence is that it looks like the sub and chopper are in radio contact as there seems to be no-one else around. But actually the chopper is speaking to some ship or base elsewhere and neither vehicle is aware of the other’s presence.

The sonar device spooks the humpbacks and causes chunks of glacier to break off into the sea, freeing two enormous, indistinct shapes, one of which is roughly shark-like and the other approximately octopoid. MacNeil catches a glimpse as she tries to steer the sub away from danger but dismisses the sight as her imagination.

MacNeil is sacked - for ‘borrowing’ the sub - by whatever institution employs her, but not before she is called to examine a forced perspective lump of stuff which is presumably a whale carcass although it is not actually named as such. She is convinced that the injuries on this beast are natural - bite-marks - but is over-ruled. When nobody is looking she removes a two-foot-long, jagged, off-white, razor-edged slab of something from the carcass.

Unemployed, she moves in with one of her old professors, an Irish ex-Navy-guy named Lamar Sanders (Dublin-born Sean Lawlor, who was Captain Nemo in the Asylum’s Verne homage 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea and was also in Space Truckers and Titanic). Together, they conduct all sorts of scientific tests on the mysterious shard. Of course, any real marine biologist would spend their time measuring every piece of the thing and searching scientific journals for something comparable. But in this movie’s version of ‘science’, everything involves combining aqueous liquids in conical flasks.

Seriously, that’s all they do. In this and other science scenes. Conical flask with liquid A. Pour or drip in liquid B and watch liquid A either change colour or stay the same. Because that’s what scientists do, right?

After a considerable amount of this, MacNeil and Sanders eventually conclude that the two-foot-long, jagged, off-white, razor-edged slab removed from a giant bite-wound is... a tooth! Seriously. There’s the whole conical flask montage thing and it all builds up to the two of them saying, in amazement: “It’s a tooth!”

No shit, Sherlock.

What sort of marine biologist can’t identify a shark’s tooth, even at umpteen times normal size? Although, to be fair, this particular prop has been created by someone who has obviously never seen a shark’s tooth. Which is understandable really, because they’re so rare. It’s not like you can pick them up for a few cents from any beachfront gift shop...

Meanwhile, we get to enjoy a couple of scenes of the newly unfrozen mega-shark and giant octopus wreaking havoc on the high seas. The cephalopod attacks a Japanese-owned oil platform, which the caption identifies as belonging to the ‘Kobayshi’ corporation - although they probably meant to type the much more common Japanese name ‘Kobayashi’. A single, Australian survivor of this disaster (Michael Teh, who played Keanu Reeves in a film called Little Klaus Big World) is questioned in Japan while the official story released to the press is that there were no survivors and the cause of the disaster is unknown.

A giant octopus attacking an oil rig is all well and good, but the film’s most notorious moment is the giant shark’s astounding first appearance, leaping out of the water to grab an airliner in flight. This is a scene of utterly astounding magnificence, glimpsed briefly at the very end of the trailer but much more effective here where we have 30 seconds or so of build-up. Outside shots of the plane; interior shots of the stewardess asking people to put their seats up; some bad turbulence (because of course, any attack by a sea monster can only take place during a storm, even at 15,000 feet).

Then that great POV shot from inside the plane as a single passenger in exactly the right (or wrong) seat looks out and just has time to say “Holy shit!”

It would have been easy to milk this scene but its brevity is its success. Plane is flying, man looks out of window, shark bites plane. Remember that ludicrous bit in Orca - Killer Whale where the titular beast actually destroys a house? It’s like the guys at The Asylum have watched Orca recently and gone, “Pfft - that’s nothing. We can come up with something that will really knock their socks off.”

So superb is the shark-vs-airliner scene that it has swiftly passed into the general zeitgeist, to the extent that I found a diagram on a genuine marine biology website calculating exactly how deep and fast the shark would need to go in order to be able to launch itself high enough to grab the plane.

In setting out to investigate mysterious maritime goings-on, MacNeil and Sanders are joined by Japanese scientist Seiji Shimada, with whom Lamar has been in contact by e-mail although they have never met. Shimada flies over to the States: it’s never clear where these folk are but it looks like California and, the prologue notwithstanding, it sure as heck isn’t Alaska. Actually, that’s rather ironic because this film has more captions identifying locations than any other movie I’ve ever seen. Every three to four minutes, it seems, a bunch of words appears on screen to tell us where we are, even though we can usually tell from the ensuing scene what sort of place it is and no-one ever mentions any location by name.

Anyway, back to Shimada-san. He is played by Chicago-born Vic Chao who definitely looks more Asian-American than Japanese - and isn’t ‘Chao’ a Chinese name? Nevertheless, against all expectations, Shimada turns out to be the romantic lead, falling in love with and even getting down and dirty (not shown!) with MacNeil. Credit must be given to this little film for breaking down stereotypes like this and highlighting the prejudices and assumptions that still exist within society. Come on, when was the last time you saw a film where the principal romance was between a white girl and an Asian guy? And we’re not talking arthouse here, we’re talking Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus. Nor are we talking about a rebellious white girl because, for all the character’s sub-stealing recklessness and a couple of intervening decades, this is Debbie freaking Gibson, a women who spent her teenage years as the squeaky-cleanest, all-American teen imaginable and who never, as far as I know, turned bad-girl. This isn’t Britney, this is the blonde one who wasn’t Tiffany.

And Chao? He was an engineering graduate before he took up acting. One of his early roles was inside the mascot of the Chicago Bulls basketball team and he was also a contestant on American Gladiators. He has played a mix of Chinese, Japanese and American characters on big and small screen including two recurring roles in 24. He was in Mask of the Ninja, Organizm and Miss Congeniality 2.

When the trio are kidnapped by Government agents, we finally meet the fourth of our leads: second-billed king of the pony-tails Lorenzo Lamas. He plays Allan Baxter, a no-nonsense, straight-talking ‘equal opportunity racist’ (which really means he makes one passing comment about “limeys and spics”) who is in charge of some non-specific US government force, which has full access to all military and naval resources. It’s Baxter’s job to deal with the unleashed sea monsters and he has forcibly recruited MacNeil, Sanders and Shimada to help him.

Lamas, of course, is a legend with a career that combines sappy daytime soaps (Falcon Crest, The Bold and the Beautiful) with cheesily awesome action series (Renegade, The Immortal). Film roles include Gladiator Cop, CIA Code Name: Alexa, Terminal Justice, Dark Waters, Raptor Island, Sci-Fighters, Succubus: Hell Bent and the previously mentioned 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Clearly, Lamas is the man.

The first thing they do is realise that the wave of attacks are the work of two giant beasts, not one. They work this out by looking at a map of attacks: the North Pacific is dotted with scores of points but there are also three or four off Newfoundland. So there must be two monsters because it can’t be in the Atlantic and the Pacific at the same time. Although of course anything that could swim through the Northwest Passage could easily swim back again. And indeed so it presumably does because their plan to deal with the titanic twosome involves cornering one in San Francisco Bay and the other in Tokyo Bay.

They also don’t give any consideration to the possibility that there might be more than two of these things.

Then a package arrives from MacNeil’s old pal Vince which is plainly a DVD although Sanders refers to it as a 'videotape'. This is footage from a camera onboard the mini-sub from the prologue and clearly shows what MacNeil thought she saw: a giant octopus and a, well, mega-shark. Incidentally, the shark is identified early on as a prehistoric Megalodon, despite the fact that it is clearly more than twice the size of such a beast. There is also an unfunny and inconsistent recurring joke about MacNeil referring to a ‘giant squid’ with Sanders and Shimada correcting her: “Octopus!”

Anyway, the plan that our team devise is to lure the giant octopus into Tokyo Bay - because giant monsters must always attack Tokyo. It’s a tradition or an old charter or something. And the mega shark will be lured into San Francisco Bay. Once bay-bound, each beast will be destroyed by ... something. I’m really not sure how this is going to work. If you want to have a pitched battle with a super-massive predator, wouldn’t it be better to do that away from busy shipping lanes and major population centres?

And how will they lure the things there? After more malarkey with coloured liquids in conical flasks, our team of scientists come up with the idea of pheromones. Well, sharks are renowned for their incredible sense of smell - and octopuses have pretty good smell-sense too. No, the problem here is: how could anyone possibly know what the pheromones of these creatures smell like? Remember: these are species unknown to science, there’s only one of each and no-one has got close enough to study it without being eaten. Even if we were to just take a best guess (Megalodon’s closest living relative is the Great White - although some experts argue that it is actually the Mako) we don’t even know if these monsters are male or female.

Well, as plans go, this is only partially successful. Yes, they are able to lure the monsters into the respective bays, but whatever the second part of the plan was, it fails. The shark takes a massive bite out of the Golden Gate Bridge, while the octopus trashes Tokyo, although the latter carnage is only reported to us via a video-link with Shimada who has gone back to his home country to co-ordinate things there.

Plan A failed. Then MacNeil comes up with Plan B: “The thriller in Manila! We’ll get them to fight each other!” After all, they were locked in mortal combat when they were frozen in the ice millions of years ago. So they obviously don’t like each other. And this is a film with ‘versus’ in the title, after all.

Let’s just consider that title, because it is one of the greatest ever. It tells you exactly what you’re going to get. It is just clunky enough to not be slick but not so clunky that it doesn’t roll off the tongue. It is instantly memorable. It positions this film in the subgenre of great clashes: Freddy vs Jason, Alien vs Predator, King Kong vs Godzilla (all the way back to Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man). And what is really cool is that this is not a sequel or a spin-off. It’s just: there’s this giant octopus, right, and this mega-shark, right, and they’re going to have a fight, right.

Genius. Genius, I tell ya.

So anyway, vast squadrons of CGI submarines are called into play, both American and Japanese. Lots of them, all sailing along below the surface within a few metres of each other. Unbelievably dangerous.

Except, in an elementary mistake, these very obviously aren’t American or Japanese subs. They’re British. What’s the difference? It’s the fins, the horizontal planes used to assist diving and surfacing. American subs - and Japanese ones - have them on the conning tower. British subs - and CGI ones, evidently - have them on the bow.

I’m really disappointed. Bang goes my suspension of disbelief. I can accept a 40-metre Megalodon. I can accept an octopus that’s larger than an oil rig. I can accept both aquatic behemoths surviving, frozen in ice, for millions of years. I can accept the preparation of megalodon pheromones in a conical flask. I can accept Debbie Gibson as a marine biologist.

But if you ask me to accept a US Navy submarine with diving planes on the bow, I will just say no. There is a line to be drawn and I’m drawing it here.

Anyway, the subs use the pheromones to draw the monsters together. MacNeil and Sanders are in one of the US Navy subs (during Plan A they were in the mini-sub which apparently she has been allowed to use again) and Shimada is in one of the Japanese subs. The submarine sets incidentally, are okay: bunch of dials and things on the walls, periscope in the middle, red light over everything. But they are less successful in the scenes where basically the same sets are passed off as the bridge of a surface vessel. Bridges tend to be pretty well lit - windows on three sides usually - rather than encased in metal and illuminated with a red bulb.

The climax, though exciting I suppose, isn’t really very interesting. Let’s face it - once we’ve seen the shark attack an aeroplane and a major US landmark, everything else will be a disappointment. Shimada’s sub looks like it has been sunk - but no, he’s okay! And the two monsters tumble down into the deep, locked in mortal combat, although I’m fairly certain we don’t see either of them actually die. Which of course opens up the possibility of a sequel.

The Asylum aren’t averse to sequels/prequels. They have made two War of the Worlds movies, two Transmorphers movies and two Omen-esque movies. And Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus has easily been their highest profile picture to date. As soon as the trailer was released, it became an internet meme. I don’t know how many people have seen the film, but a lot more people are aware of it than, say, Alien vs Hunter or King of the Lost World.

But if they do a second film, how will they up the ante? Are they going to add a third monster? Because that’s what people will want. Just like, after Freddy vs Jason, the fans were clamouring for Freddy vs Jason vs Ash or Freddy vs Jason vs Chucky. So what can The Asylum do? Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus vs... what? The supercroc from Supercroc maybe? Or the monster from their Cloverfield rip-off Monster? Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus meets the Wolf Man?

Wait! I’ve got it!

What’s big, aquatic, dangerous, world-famous but conveniently devoid of copyright?

Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus ... vs Nessie!

Oh yes. Get me The Asylum on the phone now. Because that’s a film they need to make and I’m the guy to write the script for them.

Meanwhile, what else can be said about Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus? Well, writer-director Jack Perez, who uses the pseudonym ‘Ace Hannah’ here, previously directed the Asylum’s Omen knock-off 666: The Child, when he preferred to call himself ‘Jake Johnson’. But he’s fooling no-one. He also helmed Canadian TV movie Monster Island and Andy Hurst-scripted sequel Wild Things 2. I found an online interview with him and he seems a pretty cool guy.

Among the large cast, most of whose characters have no names, are Mark Hengst (Live Evil), Stephen Blackehart (Retro Puppet Master, Cannibal Dead, Tromeo and Juliet), John Bolen (the 2005 silent Call of Cthulhu), Russ Kingston (Day of the Dead 2: Contagium), Cooper Harris (A Rogue in Londinium, Meteor Apocalypse) and Matt Lagan (various anime voices). Many of these actors have previous form with The Asylum, having appeared in the likes of 100 Million BC, The Terminators, Death Racers, 2012: Doomsday, 666: The Beast, Princess of Mars and, erm, Sunday School Musical.

Cinematographer Alexander Yellen is also an Asylum veteran with Universal Soldiers, I am Omega, 100 Million BC and Street Racer under his belt. Composer Chris Ridenhour likewise has worked for the company, scoring Transmorphers, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Merlin and the War of Dragons, The Terminators and Dragonquest. Funkily named editor Marq Morrison on the other hand is an Asylum virgin, most of his previous credits being DVD extras for things like Earth vs the Flying Saucers and Charlie Chan box sets. Make-up designer Megan Nicoll has the usual Asylum credits but has also worked on two zombie films I had not previously heard of: My Wife is a Zombie and ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction.

The DVD includes a trailer, a couple of minutes of bloopers and an eight-minute Making Of which includes interviews with the four leads and DP Yellen although director ‘Ace Hannah’ is conspicuous by his absence. Behind-the-scenes footage shows that the film was just called Mega Shark on the slate but I suspect that’s not so much an alternative working title as simply a clapper loader who couldn’t be bothered to write the whole thing out.

Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus works brilliantly. Everything that’s right about it is perfect but, even more importantly, everything that’s wrong about it is just wrong enough to be, well, perfect. It knows just how daft the premise is but it never milks that. The actors play it commendably straight and that makes the film all the more entertaining. The effects are not over-used and fit the overall tone.

You would have to be a right miserable sod to not enjoy this. It’s fab.

MJS rating: A

review originally posted 31st January 2010