GUEST REVIEWER: Daniel Schaub: He's a bamf and here's his stuff. Last time he was a chef lets see what is the trash he threw out tonight.
Before I begin, I have to admit that I watched three different films to try and find my new trash film. I will probably be reviewing them all at one point, but I decided upon this film because of its spectacular failure to entertain. Production company The Asylum's single purpose on this Earth seems to be taking films that were already made and change around a few letters or words in the title (Transmorphers, Snakes on A Train, etc.) and release an utter piece of trash, but I'll be damned if they aren't entertaining in an awful way. But this film is by far the worst, and not even enjoyable in a fun way. Let's begin:
In the world of movie titling where gerunds, superlatives, and nouns are thrown around so frequently that they must surely suffer from shaken-baby syndrome, some films sneak up on you and some films, in the case of M.S.VS.G.O., flaunt themselves and slap you in the face with their, presumably, enormous testicles, begging to be watched. Perhaps this is why the film caused quite the internet tizzy, or the image of a shark biting a plane in mid-air was so jaw-droppingly ridiculous that it had to be watched. Maybe my script for Super Llama Vs. Ultra-Alpaca will finally be sold. Either way the production company knew this film was carrying stones so massive that it outweighed the cumulative sum of 30,000 Ethiopians.
Rather than go on and on about the directing or writing, both done by Mark Perez under the mind-blowing moniker Ace Hannah, as if he were a pulp fiction hero coming in to save the damsel in distress at the last second , this would be counter productive. No one is watching this film for the director, the writer, or anything that actually makes a movie a good one. Viewers, like myself, watch this film to see a movie title lived out on celluloid.
So, instead of doing the normal review thingy, I will instead share with you the story that leads to ultimate conflict between said shark and octopus. Warning matey, thar' be spoilers ahead.
The story opens with stock footage of the mountains, beautiful and awe inspiring, covered with deliciously amateur titles that could be created in I-Movie. Where's the lightning effect when you need it? We are then magically transported to the “Alaskan” Sea because the director assumes none of viewers ever took geography in elementary. The government is testing an illegal low-frequency sonar array, and by the government I mean a civilian helicopter with a guy in a green jumpsuit and mirrored sunglasses.
At this point we are introduced to our plucky and attractive, not sexy just attractive, hero, Emma MacNeil (Deborah Gibson). Emma has stolen, or borrowed in her words, a multi-million dollar min-sub to watch the whales moving in the area, not even study. Here we are presented with the most ridiculous image of the entire film. That's right, in a film about a massive shark and enormous octopus, there's something worse. I'm no marine biologist but when I see hammer-head sharks and stingrays swimming in the “Alaskan” Sea my mind has to ask, “Don't these animals like warm water? Like South Africa?” I guess they wandered too far North. Or maybe ate an inebriated swimmer and ended up perpetrating SWI (Swimming While under the Influence). Continuing...
As the sonar array is triggered the whales are thrown into a hissy-fit and try to commit suicide by flinging themselves into the ice shelf. If only whales could cover their ears we would be saved a lot of trouble because this mass suicide causes the ice shelf to break and releases our eponymous villains, the shark and the octopus. Our heroine sees these creatures up close, even sees one of them swim away, but dismisses it as imaginary; you never see new species when you're under the water.
The two creatures instantly begin wreaking havoc upon the seas, destroying oil rigs and... planes?
Our heroine escapes the swarm of lemming-like whales and returns to California where she is called in to inspect the corpse of a washed up whale. Even though she inspects the whale, her opinion, like that of any expert, is ignored by her superiors because experts, as the movies have taught us, are always ignored. She sneaks onto the beach to retrieve a piece of polymer painted and cut to look like a fracture of a tooth and shows it to her old mentor, Lamar Sanders (Sean Lawlor). (Who is actually a decent actor, spouting witty racist Irish stereotypes left and right)
What follows can only be described as a CSI-esque lab sequence without the steroids. Flashes of people staring into test tubes filled with neon colored liquid, flashes of people staring into computer screens, ominous music, and more flashes. In the end, as I guessed, it was in fact a tooth to a megalodon. Now, if you wander over to Wikipedia, like I did, the megalodon has been figured to be somewhere between 42 feet and 52 feet. The average nuclear submarine is over 100 meters long, but our creature dwarfs it. If you're going to pretend to be scientific, read a book or, at least, a damn internet article.
Now, upon finding proof of a megalodon living and breathing, what would your first thought be? Call the newspapers? Call the government? Rejoice because you can finally take care of that pesky whale problem (because whales are basically roaches of the sea)? No, our heroes do not a damn thing, but stare at the tooth some more.
They are joined by a Japanese marine biologist, Seiji, or Seichi (Vic Chou) depending on who says his name. When three brilliants biology minded minds are brought together, surely progress is not too far to follow. No, they stare at the tooth some more.
The government, deciding that a massive shark could be a problem, try to kill the megalodon but, in typical science-fiction fashion, our weapons are no match for the creatures. We can punch holes in six inch thick steel boat plating, destroy entire countries, and kill millions with the flip of switch but we can't pierce shark skin. God forbid that we ever attacked by a giant turtle because we would be fucked. When our government fails at killing this creature, our heroes are brought in to help destroy or capture the shark and the octopus.
Now, this would be called the point of no return, the end of Act One. Typically, now we move into Act Two, the longest section of any film; any film that is except this one. Act Two turns out to be a flurry of events in about ten minutes, because, hell, who has time for character development? Not Ace Hannah, he's got a damsel in distress to save from Nazis! The following ten minutes can only really be described in fragmented sentences, so...
Ten minutes in ten words: attract creatures, how, well..., sex (between Seiji and Emma for the record, not Seiji and Lamar which would have been hilarious), pheromones, try, fail, destroyed bridge.
Now if that seems quick for ten minutes, or so, it is, but as our heroes once again stare into test tubes trying to figure out how to attract the creatures you want to yell “Pheromones? Pheromones! Jesus, stop having sex! People are dying! How the hell did any of you get your degrees?!” Never has ten-minutes of staring into test tubes been more boring, except for the prior ten minutes where they stared at a different set of test tubes. After bringing the shark in San Francisco Bay, because there aren't any more bays along the California coast. Oh, wait, they actually were at Half Moon Bay earlier. And Point Dume, which is actually a bay? Anyways, in the movies Murphy's Law is always in high-gear, otherwise what would be the point of watching? So, after absolutely everything goes wrong, the shark takes a bite out of the Golden Gate Bridge killing hundreds. But we're not treated to any close-ups of these poor people. In fact, now that I think of it, there weren't any close-ups in the entire film...
Now, we move into Act Three. How are our heroes going to kill a giant octopus and a mega shark? Get them to kill each other of course, because sharks love calamari and octopuses love shark fin soup. Using the same pheromones from before our heroes will bring the two together to fight. And they do so, complete with the sinking of eight submarines and the destruction of an airplane.
It's rumble time, right? The match-up of a shark and octopus seems a little one-sided, as one has eight arms and the other has fins. But it turns out that sharks are slippery. The octopus will wrap eight arms around the shark and the shark will slip out. The shark will bite at the octopus and the octopus will wrap it up again. And the shark will slip out again. This delicate tango thankfully only lasts two minutes, tops. In a movie where you've been waiting to see an octopus and shark fight, something is very wrong if you want the fight to end as soon as it started. All vision of scale and scope is lost. When two massive creatures fight under the water, with nothing else around, it might as well be a sea horse and cucumber. Why doesn't the octopus rip off a piece of reef and shiv his opponent? I don't know, but it would have been awesome.
The fight ends, with both creatures dead, and the movie ends with our heroes disregarding the test tube for a sunset. How pretty... Wait, didn't hundreds of people die and these are the people more of less to blame because they didn't blow the fucking whistle when they had the chance? Nope, I think we would all be more content if we blame the fucking whales.
Oh yeah, Lorenzo Lamas, typically a soap opera actor, was also in this. He shared the typically racist remarks with Lamar, but his were mostly about the Japanese. Fun!
The Asylum makes plenty of trash films but most are a joy to watch, this is not. It is just bad, bad, bad.
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