Octopus (2000) Review

WEEK 5: SOMETHING SMELLS FISHY

Octopus (2000) Review

When I was a kid, there was a movie I kept seeing at the video store with a cover that really grabbed my attention. It was that of a giant octopus attacking a cruise liner, and the greenish glow of the cover was almost captivating. Unfortunately, as I’m sure you know, video stores have since gone the way of the dinosaurs, and I never got a chance to rent Octopus. For whatever reason, I always imagined it would be an awesome, scary, unique creature-feature.  I wish I had seen it before I was a seasoned killer animal movie watcher.

Octopus begins aboard a submarine in the cold war, which gets hit with missiles and sinks to the bottom of the ocean, along with barrels of toxic waste. Decades later, a special agent, who looks like a discount Keanu Reeves, is tasked with taking a terrorist aboard an American nuclear submarine along the same route. Meanwhile, on the surface, men and women working for the terrorist are planning to break him out. Also on board the sub as a guest is a hot woman, who is supposedly a doctor, though she conducts few scientific tasks, and is mostly struggling to keep her clothes on. First they play strip poker: she’s half-naked. Then she changes clothes: half naked again. Then she spills something on her shirt and takes it off, and even when they’re trying to escape a dangerous situation later in the movie, she feels the need to take off her skirt so she can swim easier. She’s clearly just there to be a tease. Oh, and there’s a giant mutant octopus menacing them, too.

Octopus is a pretty underwhelming movie, but taking into account some of the limitations put on this production and the history of the movie, it’s a little easier to forgive its shortcomings. First off, this is a made-for-TV movie (the transitions and multiple fades to black make it obvious) and it very clearly has a low budget. It’s not the sort of low budget that’s embarrassingly evident, though; the filmmakers took the material as seriously as they could. If they had made it out to be a joke, it would have been a total bust. At least Octopus isn’t a total bust.

The first scene where the main character is introduced is a surprisingly dramatic action sequence, in which the agent’s overweight partner gets killed by the terrorist dude. The terrorist is pretty over-the-top, and he sort of reminded me of Jon Voight in Anaconda, but in this situation, it actually makes a little more sense, because the terrorist is very clearly and consistently a nut, and as a result, it doesn’t come off as ridiculous as Jon Voight. The agent and the hot girl have a bunch of awkward moments in the first act (I guess because they like each other and it’s supposed to be funny), but it all comes off as really forced. They have little to no chemistry, and are both often annoying. The acting from the submarine crew is inconsistently good. In one scene where a couple of the guys are genuinely terrified, the acting is shockingly convincing, but then in other scenes, the “clever” one-liners drop like stones and the dialogue comes out in droning exposition, making it hard to retain what they’re talking about. Still, I’ll take inconsistently good acting over consistently bad acting. 

There’s this weird moment where a dramatic conversation done in voiceover is playing, and it ends with one of the guy’s sneezing and the other saying, “bless you.” It’s a bizarre little moment, and there are quite a few small moments that stick out as peculiar anomalies. There are some shots of the sub and rocks falling that are supposed to look like they’re underwater, but they very clearly were not filmed underwater. The octopus makes a variety of screeches, including elk cries and parrot squawks, until the third act, where it inexplicably starts making the pig sounds pulled straight out of the movie Crocodile. That brings me to the titular antagonist, and the main issue with this movie: the creature.

The octopus is completely absent from the first act. The filmmakers took a page from James Cameron’s Aliens with the octopus’ first attack (it is identical in several aspects) which doesn’t come until over thirty minutes in, and it’s unremarkable, but the second attack is more exciting. Unfortunately, the octopus is barely in the rest of the movie, and given it’s the title of said movie, that’s pretty disappointing. Not until the very end does the octopus action go all-out, but it’s both a blessing and a blunder. While the action is goofy fun, it showcases just how bad the special effects are, mainly in regards to the octopus itself. The cgi is of the lowest quality, but it’s acceptable earlier on because it’s only shown in the briefest of glimpses. It’s a frustrating contradiction: more action was needed to make the movie better, but it also would have made it worse, akin to a SyFy original film (for contrast, Octopus had a 5 million dollar budget, compared with Sharknado’s 1 million dollar budget). The whole movie feels like it was trying to be R-rated, but it’s only PG-13, and just like Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid, I think a lot of the action scenes were cut as a result. But it’s not like they didn’t push the boundaries; the hot girl tries to get naked, and she gets about as close as PG-13 could allow.

Octopus is definitely not the amazing killer animal film I imagined it might be in my youth. The ending is by far the most fun part of the movie, but then it has one of the most abrupt conclusions I’ve ever seen in any movie! It’s so abrupt, I guess the studio thought they had to follow it up with a sequel, which they did. Check out my review for the second Octopus film tomorrow!