A few months
back, after watching The Asylum's absolutely, positively awful
'Shark Week', I said I was done watching low budget shark
attack movies. Of course that's crazy talk. I
could no more stop watching low budget shark attack movies
than I could stop eating cinnamon rolls, especially when we
got word that a third Mega Shark movie was in the
pipeline. Being a fan of movies, you could tell me that
Scorcese and Coppola are uniting to make a 4th Godfather movie
and have found a way to resurrect Marlon Brando from the dead
to reprise his role as Don Corleone. That would please
me. But tell me there's a third Mega Shark movie… that
makes me unreasonably happy, and I wish I knew why.
Guess what? Best. Mega Shark. Ever. Which,
admittedly, might not be that great of an achievement.
But it is an achievement, nonetheless.
A frigate is dragging a Glacier to Egypt to help deal with the
drought, but unbeknownst to the captain and his first mate,
there's totally a Mega Shark in that ice cube and once free,
it wastes no time making a mess things. Like batting
this ship with its caudal fin a couple hundred miles and
taking out the Sphinx. Not cool.
The emergence of this Megalodon is worse than you could ever
have imagined. It's stopped all shipping lanes, trade
across the globe has ceased, people making a living at sea no
longer have jobs, so this big shark, all by itself, has
crippled the economy of the entire planet Earth. This
introduces to the happy married couple of Dr. Rosie (Elisabeth
Rohm) and Dr. Jack (Christopher Judge) who are a couple of
shark scientist or something and are giving their mini-mech
shark a run through. Their testing is rudely interrupted
by the hyper aggressive Admiral Engleberg (Matt Lagan) who has
just finished construction on a brand new mega sized
MechaShark to take down Mega Shark and he needs Dr. Rosie to
pilot it.
Jack is
totally opposed to this because this shark ship hasn't been
tested in the water yet (?) and worse, it doesn't have his
fancy NERO A.I. installed, but Rosie is gung ho, and this
needs to happen because Mega Shark is Off The Chain. I
mean he's wrecking everything. Pretty much for no
reason. Submarines, oil rigs, destroyers, cities… and we
already know from previous installments that Mega Shark does
not like low flying aircraft. So Rosie jumps in this
thing, which from the outside looks to be size of three
nuclear subs, but inside is the same size of the mini-mech we
saw earlier and only houses one person. Unfortunately,
the maiden voyage doesn't go very well. This new tragedy
brings back some bad memories for Rosie and threatens to
reunite her with her old friend Beefeater. Why a
recovering alcoholic travels around with a bottle of gin her
bag… I don't know.
What MechaShark needs is a retrofit and a NERO install and it
will be ready to go. In theory. Another battle
between Mecha and Mega takes place, Mecha gets its ass kicked…
again… but in the process of this beatdown Mecha's wires get
crossed and now Mecha is just as evil as Mega. And
MechaShark has the ability to travel on land. Sydney
Australia is going to have words with the U.S.A. and our
haywire technology totally wrecking their town when this is
done.
Now we're really up against it. Mega Shark at sea,
MechaShark on land, both indestructible. I don't know
how this is going to resolve itself. I know it will, and
I saw it happen, but I'm still not sure how it happened.
Directed by new Asylum director Emile Edwin Smith, Mega Shark
vs. Mecha Shark was pretty darned entertaining. It's
almost a good movie without applying my Asylum curve.
Almost. For starters the director follows the simple
rule of Character First. Christopher Judge and Elisabeth
Rohm, aside from being solid actors, actually seemed like a
real couple in this movie that genuinely cared for each
other. Maybe more Chris than Liz, and we're not going to
get into all of that, but that's worth something in a
movie. That kind of gets you invested into their
well-being. Then there's our real star, the Mega Shark,
which falls perfectly with what I want from my movie
monsters. That is that they have no particular goal, no
agenda, and wreck stuff simply because they can.
Previous Mega Sharks liked to belly flop over Destroyer
battleships, this Mega Shark belly flops on top of Destroyer
Battleships, which makes way more sense. My favorite
scene was probably Christopher Judge riding his motorcycle
through Sydney, at a top speed of about eight miles an hour…
thinking Chris hasn't ridden many motor bikes… and then
somehow at this breakneck speed launches himself over Mecha
Shark, Evil Kneivel style. It was something to
see. And Dr. McNeil… Played by Deborah Gibson… reappears
after taking a break from Mega Shark 2. You can't beat
that with a stick.
Typical of the series, we do spend a lot of time watching
people look at screens and looking at people pressing buttons
and stuff, but this director even found a way to make this
seem a little better and move a little faster than previous
Mega Shark directors. And what was with the
buttons and knobs? It's the 21st century. Touch
screens. Please. Sure the narrative was fractured
and fragmented at times, and it's not the smartest movie
around, but it's a Mega Shark movie. We did notice that
every time Mega Shark wrecked something, we were subjected,
over and over again, to dudes insanely running up and down
stairs of whatever, and it did look like these were the same
dudes running up stairs on a destroyer, then downstairs on an
oil rig, and I was wondering where they were going in such
hurry. And not to be all persnickety about editing or
anything, I mean it's a low budget shark attack movie, but
when cutting from a reverse shot when one character is
caressing another's face, and in the other reverse, she's not
caressing his face, and it goes back and forth… we might also
notice that. No real fix for this except to reshoot,
which we know ain't gonna happen, just saying is
all.
Yes, 'Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark' is flawed and there are way
more things wrong with it than I went into, but I almost liked
this movie without qualification. It's great for an
Asylum movie, and almost pretty okay for a normal movie.
