How bad?

So bad.

The next title in DK Canada’s highly enjoyable Monsters in the Movies is so horribly bad it doesn’t even come close to the so bad it’s good concept. This is just a horrible horrible horrible example of shoddy filmmaking, terrible computer graphics, and not even wooden acting, closer to soggy cardboard that has been left on in the rain, brought back inside, warmed up and then thrown out again.

Everything in this movie is terrible, and that’s sad, because it even includes a former crush of mine, Debbie Gibson, who is the film’s lead. She plays a ‘scientist’ who is a witness when a government device inadvertently aids in destroying an ice floe and frees two prehistoric beasts locked within, a mega-shark (or megladon) and a giant octopus.

It seems the two creatures were flash-frozen millions of years ago mid-battle and now that they are free, they have a whole new world to feast on. While the shark jumps out of the water to feed on passenger airliners, the octopus attacks oil refineries. It’s up to  Gibson as Emma MacNeill to pair up with a Japanese scientist, Seiji (Vic Chao) and her former professor Lamar (Sean Lawlor) under the command of the racist Baxter (Lorenzo Lamas) to find a way to put a stop to the creatures.

They try to draw them apart, and battle them independently before realising they should just let them destroy each other, and they should just sit and watch, and demand to talk to their agents about getting them tied up in this mess in the first place.

Filled with silly plot holes, and worse sets and effects, it’s hard to even try to have a suspension of disbelief. Instead all you can do is sit there and wonder why you wasted the time. Even my crush on Gibson wasn’t enough to make me watch it all.

The effects are horrible, the shark’s fin doesn’t leave a wake, a destroyer fires it’s main batteries but the shells explode underwater, despite the fact that they were aimed in the air, neither creature looks remotely alive, the sets are even more ridiculous than those of the early Doctor Who serials, and the acting is painful.

How this series of films got commissioned, or made enough money to warrant sequels is beyond me. In fact they helped inspire a whole ridiculous sub-genre. And I have a feeling I’ll be seeing a few more of them as I explore more of nature’s creatures in this chapter from the brilliant Monsters in the Movies from DK Books.

Pick one up and find something monstrous (not this one) to watch tonight.