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So, naturally when I came across the poster and trailer for an obviously small budget project by the title of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, I was intrigued – maybe even a little elated at the infinite possibilities of suck.  A quick viewing of the trailer only reinforced my suspicions that a new undisputed heavyweight champ of camp may be fast emerging.  I mean, how can you not expect a horribly over-the-top movie where a 1500 foot long shark jumps out of the water, bites a flying 747 in half and drags it back into the depths of the ocean to be such a bad movie that it devolves into a comedy?

Imagine my surprise when I watched (most of) the movie and found myself drowning in disappointment.  Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus is bad, there is no question here.  It’s so bad that it should have been hilarious.  I should have been laughing so hard that my abs would be sore the next day.  In reality, it’s just so bad that you’ll want to be environmentally unfriendly and toss the DVD into the microwave and let it run overnight.

First of all, the acting is pretty much on par with – if not worse than – your typical Syfy Channel produced made-for-TV movie of an equally absurd subject, which for a movie of this ilk is to be expected.  But even the ponytail sporting awesomeness of a finely clothed, grizzled naval officer portrayed by none other than Captain Camp himself, Lorenzo Lamas, can’t do much to save the dialog, which is more like periods of whispering and shouting thanks to the awesome (insert dripping sarcasm here) microphone work by the crew.

The editing is atrocious – the director used so many random flashes of light throughout his B-roll footage that I almost had a seizure, but what really pushes this movie past the ‘so bad its good’ point is that it’s just boring.  I will usually watch any movie from start to finish.  Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus I had to fast forward in many, many places because once I realized the dialog couldn’t make this film funny all I really wanted to see was cheesy action – like a huge shark jumping out of the San Francisco Bay to chomp the Golden Gate Bridge in half.  Moments such as this account for maybe 5 minutes of the 88 minute run time.  The rest of the movie is essentially just bad dialog.  Really, really bad dialog.  Not ‘so bad its funny’ bad either, more along the lines of ‘stop talking before you impede the advancement of the human species’ bad.  Like so bad it makes Steven Segal look like an Oscar winner.  Like so bad that that David Caruso would groan in agony from watching it.  Like so bad…well, you get the idea.

Speaking of which, allow me to address writer / director Jack Perez for a moment.  Jack, did you go to school at all?  Did it not occur to you that a movie so full of really absurd continuity problems can neither be taken seriously nor be enjoyed for just being an awful movie?  I don’t really even know where to begin with this.  How about the Mega Shark – a 1500 foot long Mega Shark no less – swimming at 500 knots (that’s 575 mph to the nautically challenged)?  A Boeing 747 flies slower, though maybe that’s how the shark was able to bite one right out of the sky.  Or how about said Shark moving at 575mph through the ocean while chasing a submarine which is somehow able to outrun it?  I’m not a boat guy, but I’m pretty certain there isn’t a single buoyant object on the planet that can move that fast.

My personal favorite was the whole set up for the film – which by the way took abysmally long to establish due to the painful editing.  Really, that cute little seven year old Asian girl that did the commercials for Windows 7 could have done a better job putting the sequence together.  Anyway, so some classified top secret military sonar experiment in Alaska finds its way to the toe of a large glacier in an apparently uninhabited area (where, of course, the protagonists are in a small submarine studying a nearby pod of whales).  The sonar activates and all the whales decide to start ramming into the glacier (because whales apparently do that sort of thing), which causes a huge chunk of ice to cleave into the ocean instantly releasing the Mega Shark from its frozen-for-millions-of-years captivity.  Never mind the fact that any animal which might be frozen in a glacier wouldn’t instantly, if at all, come back to life.  Never mind the fact that there isn’t a single glacier on earth which is composed of sea water and thus there isn’t a single glacier on earth which would harbor a frozen shark.  But how about that our Mega Shark is supposedly 80 some odd million years old, yet the oldest ice on earth is only about 750,000 years old – and it isn’t anywhere near Alaska.  Perhaps this is a time traveling Mega Shark?  We may never know.

I could literally go on and on here.  The stock footage of the Battleships with their guns lowered and pointed straight forward which happen to still be firing; the Naval submarine with “emergency super turbo boosters”; the pilot of the aforementioned submarine getting so nervous about his steering in an underwater canyon that he snaps, pulling a gun on his captain which results in a strangely homoerotic Mexican standoff which is only resolved when our generically forgettable 95 lb heroine TKO’s the instigator with a right hook (though I have to admit this scene was fairly amusing); the giant Octopus tentacle swatting a fighter jet out of the air, etc.  I really don’t know if writer / director Jack Perez thought he was being funny, or if he thought this would actually make a good movie or what.  All I know is he sucked in doing it, and not in a good way.

All I wanted out of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus was a stupid, campy movie with a horrible plot, cheesy one-liners, bad special effects and unnecessary drama at all the wrong times that I could laugh uncontrollably at.  What I got was a stupid, campy movie with a horrible plot, cheesy one-liners, bad special effects and unnecessary drama at all the wrong times that ended up boring me so much that I actually felt like going outside to watch the grass grow, and I’m not being sarcastic whatsoever when I say that.  Why, Jack Perez could you not deliver on this simple formula?  Why is that so much to ask for?

I really can’t call this the worst movie I’ve ever seen, because that would grant it recognition deserving of jeering and lampooning for years to come.  That would grant it legitimacy as a contender among the greats by Uwe Boll and Paul W. S. Anderson.  What can be said about Jack Perez and his non-masterpiece of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus is that it takes skill to fail, but it takes something much more to fail at failing.

Maybe Wall Street should give him a job.

Grade: F | Review by Bryan Swan

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The documentary, directed by Paul Saltzman, follows the seniors at the high school that has, for decades, conducted two privately funded proms: one for whites, one for blacks. The school itself is integrated, as are its sports programs and everything else. Still, some school board members and parents insisted that the proms remain separate. In the movie, Freeman proposes to the school and students that they integrate their proms: in exchange, he’ll pay for the whole thing. The decision is easy, but the movie goes on to interview the students on their opinions, relationships and friendships, attempting to explore just how this racism has affected their lives.

Prom Night in Mississippi is pretty vanilla, but it’s shocking that there are communities that are still so racist. Having lived most of my entire life in Seattle, this kind of blatant racism is foreign to me, and in that regard, there’s something captivating about the documentary. Some of the stories the students tell are extremely interesting and sad at the same time.

Still, as far as documentaries go, it isn’t as hard hitting as it should have been. The movie does a good job of interviewing the students, who for the most part are open to change, but fails to land a single interview with someone opposed to the integration. If so many people in town are racist, surely Saltzman could have gotten a few people on camera. Furthermore, when parents advocating for an all-white prom invited students to a meeting, couldn’t he have snuck a tape recorder inside? Bottom line: the documentary should have been more ambitious.

Prom Night also stumbles in the final half hour as the prom kicks into gear. As valuable as it is to see the prom, nothing really happens during this time other than typical prom stuff. A little less emphasis on the end product and more on the friction leading up to the prom would have gone a long way.

Prom Night in Mississippi suffers from a lack of hard-hitting filmmaking and would have benefited greatly from more insight into the Charleston community, but it still works nonetheless.

The Blu-Ray comes with the typical caché of special features, an almost requisite amount of items designed to sway potential buyers. Though the special features are ultimately forgettable, for what there is, there’s some decent material here. The Blu-Ray version of the film includes a few exclusive special features, including some deleted scenes and two featurettes.

A More Perfect You: The Science of Surrogates takes a look at the thought process behind how the robots work and look in the world of Surrogates. There are a few worthwhile moments here, though at 10 or 15 minutes there’s not a lot to feast on.

Breaking the Frame: A Graphic Novel Comes to Life features an interview with the writer/creator of the graphic novel (I didn’t know it was based on a graphic novel) and details his excitement about his first-time project being adapted into a Bruce Willis film of all things. The featurette shows some panels from the comic book, though it misses out on giving more insight into what’s similar and what’s not. From the few panels that are shown, it looks like Surrogates the movie is quite different from its source material.

The deleted scenes present some interesting ideas, though it’s clear why they were cut from the movie. As is the case with most deleted scenes, there’s nothing very memorable here.

Other features, which are available on the DVD version as well, include a music video by Breaking Benjamin (does anyone watch the music videos that are included on discs?) and an audio commentary by director Jonathan Mostow.

All in all, the special features are neither great nor underwhelming. For a B-grade movie that didn’t do particularly well in theaters, the special features included on the disc are about what should be expected. The quality is decent, but most of the features lack the depth to make them memorable.

Surrogates is worth seeing, but more as a rental.

To set things straight, the original Smokin’ Aces wasn’t that good. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t that good, either. A victim of its own hype, it lacked the memorable action sequences – and a single meaningful protagonist – for a movie like that to succeed. So, when a direct-to-DVD release was announced, there was little question as to how good it would be.

Assassins’ Ball has a plot that has something to do with a federal witness being placed in a maximum security safe room somewhere underground (the creative bastards really mixed things up this time, as the last one took place on the top floor of a Vegas hotel), and a bunch of assassins who’ve been hired to kill him. The assassins belong to the Tremor family, which include that absolutely insane trio from the first movie. Awesome. Only not.

The plot really doesn’t matter and apparently we aren’t met to care, as the writers clearly didn’t. The movie is a jumbled mess, and even at an hour and a half (and that’s the extended, unrated version) really has to draw things out to provide some apparition of a narrative. Once again, the characters are one-dimensional and unlikable; in the few minutes that actually grab the attention, it’s unclear who to root for.

Without a decent plot or screenplay, Assassins’ Ball must rely on the action, and the action is terrible. There are a few gunfights, but nothing really happens until about halfway into the movie – and by that point, most people will have turned it off. The action that does ensue is both sporadic and uninspiring; director P.J. Pesce takes “cool” shots and styles from other, better movies and replicates them here while failing to capture any sense of suspense or set up.

Smokin’ Aces 2: Assassins’ Ball had potential, just not as anything that should ever be seen by audiences. This was a pointless sequel that has little to no merit.