Marine biologist Emma MacNeil (Deborah Gibson) is investigating the sea life around the coast of Alaska, travelling through the water in her borrowed minisub and noting the behavour of the sharks and whales there. The helicopter pilot assisting her radios in that a huge block of ice has broken free of the shoreline, but she is unbothered, at least until the whales begin smashing into the ice, breaking it open and releasing two somethings that Emma does not quite catch sight of, in spite of them being absolutely enormous. These are the prehistoric Mega Shark and the Giant Octopus, and they are about to cause havoc...
Not least upon your attention span, as this is one of the most tedious straight to DVD movies ever made, apparently created by notorious, low budget cash-in merchants The Asylum as an attempt to exploit the infamy of the similarly poorly received Shark Attack 3: Megalodon rather than a big budget hit. As with the Shark Attack film, this effort gained considerable cachet for being a punchline to gags among movie buffs on the internet, but crucially this occured before anyone had seen it. After it was released, the word spread that this did not actually live up to the promise of its title as far as entertainment value went.
To truly provide the enjoyment sorely lacking here, perhaps the production should have been handed over to a Japanese crew, because the sight of the same few nanoseconds of a mega shark powering through the sea repeated over and over again is nothing compared to the fun that's possible with some men in rubber monster suits that Japan became renowned throughout the world for. Ah, the internet, we have so much faith in it so why does it let us down? Mega Yawn versus Giant Shitefest egregiously failed to supply the bouts of monster combat we so wanted, and indeed expected.
Instead, you're subjected to what feels like a million hours of deadening chit-chat, courtesy of eighties stars Lorenzo Lamas (playing a Navy officer intent on blowing up the creatures) and Debbie - sorry, Deborah Gibson whose star may have fallen since her heyday but surely she could have picked a better vehicle than this. Every so often something potentially adrenaline-pumping will occur, such as the highly unlikely instance of the shark jumping thousands of feet into the air to eat a plane, but this will be over with within a blink of the eye, thus returning the viewer to the stodgy dialogue.
It's not even snappy dialogue, and any camp appeal that the audience were hoping in their heart of hearts for is sabotaged by an approach from director Jack Perez which suggests he thought this was supposed to be taken utterly seriously. Deb and company go through all the clichés of, no, not monster movies, but cheap science fiction television, as this feels more like the pilot for a monster of the week show, sort of an update of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, only with big creatures. And in the sea. The only genuinely scary aspect is the promise of a sequel which the movie ends on, not even the shark eating the Golden Gate Bridge (as seen for a couple of picoseconds) can match that prospect. Ready-made kitsch needs a lot more flair and imagination than this to be successful. Music by Chris Ridenhour.
[Metrodome's Region 2 DVD has a making-of featurette, bloopers (not to be confused with the main film) and a trailer as extras.]
