MEGASHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS (2009)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological*


Though most of the "colossal critter" movies that show up on the SYFY Channel are pretty lean pickings, I've noticed that the reviews they receive on IMDB usually fall into two categories. 

One is the "outrage against the standards of good entertainment" review, in which the reviewer tears apart the flick based on its many failings of sound plot, believable characters, and so on.

The other is the "this is so bad it's funny" review.  Of these two review-types, this one is the more interesting, because it raises the question: once a movie has decided to revel in its badness, can it be fairly critiqued? 

Is it at all feasible to conceive of "standards" for a deliberately bad film?

My answer is, yes and no. As to the "yes," anyone can conceive of such standards.  But since the whole idea of a bad movie is to flout one's expectations of formal merit, there would seem to be no way to make those standards anything but purely personal, which would make the answer into an operative "no."

Take for instance the Asylum film MEGASHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS, a 2009 opus which seems to have received far greater attention than most of SYFY's cookie-cutter airings.  This monster-mashup has just one scene that grabs me in the part of my cortex that says, "this is so deliriously stupid it's funny:" the above scene in which the Megashark leaps out of the ocean and gobbles up a 747 airliner, dragging it down into the sea with it.  One fan liked the scene so much that he devoted an IMDB thread to it, terming it "the greatest scene in all Movie Hollywood."  I find myself wondering if some of the appeal of this scene rests with bringing together two icons from 1970s cinema: the rapacious shark and the endangered 747.

However, for me that scene provides the only real entertainment in MEGASHARK.  The big fish's opponent, the Giant Octopus, is by no means as nicely rendered as this "Spawn of Jaws," and the script is otherwise dead-serious and deadly dull.  There's one scene in which former singer Debbie Gibson, playing a tough Navy officer, lays out a panicky seaman with a deft punch in the face, but that's the only other scene I recall.  The clash of the titanic terrors is a distinct disappointment.