Even though everyone, well most everyone, seems to be MIA at the moment, I am still here watching movies. Not like I have anything better to do. Maybe I do but I have been slacking this year when it comes to watching movies. Plus with each review, I am nearing post #300 which will be coming up very, very soon. I hope everyone comes back soon and gives me some comments for my Christmas present! Today I got real bored and decided it was the prefect time to watch a movie. So I put in the movie Octopus (2000) and tried to prepare myself to be amazed by a giant octopus that can take on a cruise ship if the poster can be believed. That isn't to much to ask....is it?Octopus starts off in a kind of weird way. It starts during the Cuban Missile Crises. A Russian sub is trying to get to Cuba so it can off load the drums of dangerous chemicals it has on board. Once I saw these I knew where things were going. A United States sub is giving the Russian sub warnings that it needs to turn around now or it will be fired on. When they get no answer, they fire off two torpedoes. They find their mark which happens to be right where the drums are. We see the sub sinking deeper into the ocean with chemicals spilling out the big hole that is now in the sub. Thirty eight years later was are now in Bulgaria. CIA agent Roy Turner (Jay Harrington) is at the United States embassy and steps out with his partner. While they are walking around outside, the embassy explodes. They figure out who did it fairly quickly because just as they were leaving, an old woman comes in with two bags but leaves with only one and they see her moments before the explosion and have to wonder what happened to her other bag. They give chase and it turns out the old woman is actually Casper (Ravil Isyanov). Casper is very well known terrorist who loves to bomb things. Roy manages to capture Casper but not before he is soon the last survivor of the bombing because he can't seem to shoot anyone.
Once our government catches wind of this they make plans to get Casper over to the States so they can find out what he knows. Since there are already people on the move to free Casper, they think their best bet would be to put Special Agent Turner with Casper on a nuclear sub that is doing some training not too far away. Even though this is supposed to be a secret, it doesn't stop the people who are on the rescue mission from finding out the details and make plans to hijack an ocean cruise ship. Captain Jack Shaw (David Beecroft) brings Roy and Casper onto his sub and his first stop is the bridge where a game of strip poker is being played out. The Captain takes this is stride and lets everyone know what is going on with their new guests. They have to travel through an area that is called, if I remember right, the Devil's Eye, or something like that. This happens to be the place the giant octopus calls home. So we have Roy that is trying to get Casper to the States while Casper is trying to get away (he is on a submarine, where is he going to run off to?) and meet up with his pals so they can blow something else up.
The effects are a mix of model and CGI. Mostly CGI from the looks of it. It didn't look too bad for the most part. I mean it wasn't the best CGI around, but it was good enough to be believable at least. The octopus did seem to change size from time to time and people complained that its mouth wasn't like any octopus they had ever seen before. Then again, it is supposed to have been mutated by the chemicals so maybe that is the reason behind that. The only time I didn't care for the CGI at all is when it was trying to interact with a real object. Like a tentacle would wrap itself around someone and pull them away. The tentacle wouldn't look real compared to the real human. Since Octopus was given a PG-13 rating, I wasn't expecting much as far as gore and got zero. We do get to see some blood in the water at one point and one character manages to have a tentacle impale him in the stomach and come out his mouth. That scene would have been even better if there had been blood...oh and guts too!
The acting was alright considering the movie. It was the characters that would be way off base so it was a little hard to fault the acting. Carolyn Lowery plays a doctor who specializes as an oceanographer. She is a big help in figuring out what it is that attacks the sub and finding out what it is after. Are you ready for this? It needs sugar. Whatever mutated the octopus caused it not to have enough sugar so that is why it is angry all the time. I swear. Anyway, I'm getting away from the point here. I thought she did a good job but there seems to be mixed reviews when it comes to her acting. Half of the reviews that bring her up seem to have liked her acting while the other half hated her. There is one other person that shows up a lot and that is Ricco Ross. Many people know him from his role in Aliens.
Octopus is all over the place when trying to decide what kind of movie it wants to be. Is it a horror film? An action movie? Or maybe it is a spy film? As a horror movie, it just doesn't work. The octopus is rarely seen up until the end of the movie. That is fine in a way since showing the monster too much can back fire at times. But since the creature doesn't do a whole hell of a lot we are left with the characters chasing after Casper who does manage to escape and can seemingly hide pretty well in a submarine. Since it can't make up its mind what kind of movie it is, we are left with a movie that has tons of plot holes in it. Like can Casper's friends truly figure out where he will be when it comes time to rescue him? The octopus manages to stick its tentacles into the sub and grab people for lunch so why isn't water rushing in at all?
The characters don't act like they should the biggest part of the time. We have a CIA agent that is afraid of shooting anything. A Navy Captain that doesn't mind his crew playing strip poker right on the bridge when an international terrorist is being brought aboard. And a doctor that is a major flirt and seems to get teased about her losing her clothes, for good reason. Lets not forget about the crew that take off to who knows where into the sub when things are looking real bad. A lot of people point out that the doctor was speaking with an accent when we first meet her but loses it shortly after that. They think it was because this was a bad movie and it was just another way to show just how bad this movie is. I thought she was just using the accent as a way to get to the person she was playing poker with at the time. I'm not saying this isn't a bad movie because it is. Oddly enough though, it was fairly entertaining. Not fun enough to save it but at least I wasn't fighting off trying not to sleep or findind something else to do while watching it. Might be fun to watch once, or maybe not.
2 out of 5 One tough cruise ship
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