Octopus

Starts off with a Soviet sub being lost in 1962 while on its way to Cuba. Cut to four decades later.

There's confusing hi-jinks, political intrigue, and traitors aboard an American sub that find the old sub. There's also a giant Octopus wandering around that makes periodic (and oddly timely) attacks, whenever it serves to thicken the plot. A spy is aboard the sub, and endeavors to uhhh, umm, do something bad I guess. The script doesn't make it clear, and the novice acting by the cast doesn't help, either.

Then the sub meets up with a cruise ship (!) What? Oh, and more spies show up too. The script darts around so much you'll get dizzy trying to follow it.

The final scene is about the only part that has anything of interest happen, as the Octopus makes his finest appearance. He's pretty nasty looking, as the director loves to take CGI shots into his mouth, as he attacks. Most of what you see is sloppy CGI, but at least you get to see something happen after waiting through the entire movie.

A goofy, bargain basement movie, good for sporadic moments of chaos and comedy.

Well, I was hoping this was going to be a nice little monster movie... something along the lines of Lake Placid or Komodo, both of which I enjoyed. No such luck. It's burdened down by a tedious "terrorist on board" plot, that places it closer to Turbulence (a movie I loathed) for much of its running time. It also doesn't help that the principle terrorist villain is played by quite the worst actor I've seen in any professional film I can currently recall - his version of passing as an elderly woman to infiltrate a US establishment makes Hulk Hogan look like Laurence Olivier, and his performance as his 'normal' terroristic self consists almost entirely of eye-popping, smirking and grimacing. With many principle scenes depending on this character the whole exercise is pretty much doomed from the word go. It also doesn't help that the director's style seems to be based on the principle "telegraph what's about to occur, then telegraph it again, in case the audience is *really* slow". The special effects are passable... they could have been quite effective given an engaging script, some good acting, and sound direction, but they're hardly enough to carry the movie on their own. Carolyn Lowery as the lone significant female in the cast is consistently good... but she and the creature and the explosions can't save this aquatic turkey.

"Octopus" is utterly boring; and patently ridiculous. What a pathetic waste of a perfectly good Cephalopod. So much time is spent setting up the plot that the octopus gets lost. Sure, the little heroine is totally cute. She can act too; but she can't save this mess on her own. The title "Octopus" is almost a non sequitur! During the interminable espionage conundrums, I kept thinking, "Who cares?" and "Where's the octopus?" And since when do octopi have insect mouthparts? Wouldn't a six foot long cephalopod beak suffice to scare us? The director forgot the monster, and was seemingly trying to remake "Executive Decision" in a submarine; badly. The dialogue, the action and the resolution of this muddle all violated the one axiom of monster pictures. They were boring. The entire film is boring, from start to finish. I am a dedicated monster picture fan and I won't bother to watch this catastrophe again.

I am frequently amazed that none of the directors of modern monster pictures never consider the "Old Man and the Sea" concept; the idea that nature itself is frightening and challenging. This entire film could have been made with six or seven people in a sailboat, trying to fend off a large cephalopod, or two. After all, we need some octopus fodder.

Don't bother with this one. Really. If you're a monster fan it will just make you mad.

Okay, this is just as bad as it gets. Let me hit the high points:

1) The main character. This guy has all the courage and charisma of Pee Wee Herman (no offense to Pee Wee). He's a CIA agent, and after seeing a terrorist blow up the embassy he works at, killing all his co-workers, and then killing his best friend, this guy still can't bring himself to shoot the terrorist. He does stand there pointing his gun forever though. Finally he saves the terrorist.

2) The first scene on the submarine. This is a nuclear attack submarine, yet we find the crew, on the bridge, playing strip poker while rap music blares in the background. The captain walks in and - this is what will leave a person speechless - doesn't seem to find this to be out of the ordinary. This also serves to introduce us to the main female character, and makes her seem like a bar whore. Someone addresses her as "Doctor", while at the same time her panties are on a guy's head. A Hooters Girl doing a beer bong would be more convincing as a Ph.D. than this woman. And a lot classier too. I mean, is there actually anyone out there who thinks that nuclear attack subs are run like college frat houses? And is it possible that this same person is allowed to write screenplays? And let's not even get into the fact that the captain of this boat previously had captained another sub, which he ran aground. To penalize him for this, the military gives him the job of...captaining a nuclear attack sub.

3) The idea that terrorists could hijack a cruise ship and then somehow use it to chase a submarine. Are the film makers aware that submarines travel UNDER the water, and can't be detected by any equipment available on a cruise ship? I mean, it's just impossible to fathom the level of stupidity these people have put into this movie.

Overall, I love cheesy B movies, and a few major plot holes don't bother me much. But this thing...what can one even say? You've got an unbelievably, unwatchably horrible male lead, a scummy whore female lead, a bunch of action sequences that are so incomprehensible in their stupidity that it makes a person become nauseous and disoriented, and finally a giant octopus that does all the work of killing the terrorists that the CIA agent was too much of a cowardly putz to accomplish. Hooray for the octopus. Pity the audience.

How in the world do screenplays like this actually get made into movies? I would think this stuff would be passed around from studio to studio and laughed at until the writers left the state in shame, or maybe even left the country. I mean, there are movies made for $100, 000 in Bulgaria that put this thing utterly to shame.

Ok, now I'm convinced that Hollywood producers get together and dare each other to make movies with randomly selected plot elements. This one would have been:

"Make a movie that combines Turbulence, The Hunt for Red October, Leviathan, Sphere, Speed 2, and Deep Rising."

At least, those were the movies I thought of when I was trying to figure out what this movie was. Add in Down Periscope for some "lone woman on a submarine full of horny guys" humor, and you've already seen this movie.