Title: Sharktopus
Actors/Director/Anything Worth Mentioning Right Away: Roger Corman, Roger Corman and ROGER CORMAN.
Introduction: I bought this DVD from Walmart for ten dollars. Well spent indeed.
Location: Probably where Jaws was shot, if not Spring Break Shark Attack as well.
Plot: The government (played by Eric Roberts) creates a hybrid mutant half shark/half octopus creature. It wears this sort of fancy belt (like Batman) that can control what it does (like Robin). At the beginning of the movie, the sharktopus, if you will, breaks free of this magical belt. (Abe Lincoln shed a tear) Now the very creation that man had made, was turned loose on man himself. Classic case of man being too big for his own britches. So, the daughter of Eric Roberts goes and says she can track this thing down then kill it. The only catch is, you have to shoot this special dart into it, then you get close enough, she start an application and hit the self destruct button. Let’s just say you better hope your laptop doesn’t decide to start running a system scan when this is all going down. But wait, there is another catch. They only have two of these darts, so accuracy is key. Thus, they want to tranq sharktopus before they can do all this “download the program of death into his brain” stuff. Maybe if the government would just stop messing with nature these types of things wouldn’t happen.
Acting: Eric Roberts is the only person I know in here by name, but then I do see the guy from Nacho Libre who is Jack Black’s tag team partner. It’s what you would expect about otherwise. Some people aren’t as bad as others, the people with bit parts are really bad and some people were obviously just hired to be shirtless because they have great abs. Trust me, it takes a lot of discipline to have those abs, so, obviously you can’t spend a lot of time working on reading your lines or getting into character.
Production: This was made for “SyFy” (a name I still hate using) and then released directly to DVD. It has the same production quality of just about every other movie shown on Saturday nights on that channel. It’s not quite theater worthy, but better than most movies.
Sex/Nudity: It was made for “SyFy”, so despite some of the language, this just didn’t have a place here.
Special Effects: The shark part of this movie doesn’t bother me, but the octopus part really does. Whenever the tentacles capture someone it always looks incredibly fake. It’s not just that the CGI is lacking something, but also it seems like the actors don’t really understand what they’re doing. You could have at least gotten a green or blue foam noodle or something and had the so-called actors wrestle with that for a while to simulate what the tentacle would be like. This… this just comes off looking very amateur, but, hey it does have the Roger Corman name on it, so you cannot complain too hard about the special effects.
Overall Verdict: As is the case with many monster movies these days (especially those shown on “SyFy”), you find yourself cheering on the monster. Sharktopus is no exception to that rule, as you just want to see annoying people die vicious deaths. In one scene, two guys are tossing a football. The football lands near a woman doing yoga. The guy (with a creepy little ponytail) tries some kind of pick up line and she throws the football into the water. The guy who originally threw the football yells something like, “Come on, what’s taking so long? What are you doing?” even though he should be looking directly that way and see every single thing as it happens. Again, characters you want to see have their heads eaten off. And this movie pays off. Highly recommended.
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