Sharktopus premiered on SyFy on 25 September 2010. Roger & Julie Corman produced two shark-themed films for the channel that year. Dinoshark was the other, which premiered six months earlier.
CGI shark films more or less started with Deep Blue Sea, a mostly forgettable film except for the scene where Samuel L Jackson almost gives his great rallying speech. This led to Shark Attack and its two sequels. And then there were roughly yearly TV or direct-to-video films.
As far as I know, Sharktopus is the film that sent the monster shark film in a new direction. Nothing was off the table! And this led directly to Sharknado and Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre.
What’s annoying is that these films are generally pretty boring. Sharkansas is an outlier but these films tend to feature stock characters with dusty plots rendered with minimal design and uneven acting.
Sharktopus suffers worse than most in this regard. The romantic subplot makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Eric Roberts really shines here, but that’s hardly surprising. Kerem Bürsin was at the start of his career but was already excellent. The rest of the cast is weak and made to look all the weaker compared to these two.
On the plus side, the film uses its CGI monster a lot. So you are never far from seeing another attack. And its final explosion is pretty great. The problem is that the CGI that worked well at the beginning of the film becomes increasingly less believable. And its size changes a lot from shot to shot.
But it’s such a ridiculous idea that you can’t help but find it entertaining. And just imagine as the hero and heroine leave that in a year they will have a very nasty divorce and both wish they had been killed by the sharktopus.
Sharktopus poster via Wikipedia under Fair Use.
The problem with most CGI is it’s so unimaginative. You can create anything with effects now, filmmakers, so create! Show us visions of things that only existed in your dreams, and share those visions! Be bold!
But whar we get are the visions of idiot studio execs typing “Batman fights Predator epic battle” into some A.I. content generator. The artists working on these effects are gifted (and probably underpaid, if Hollywood is still Hollywood). The result is gifted people putting their talents into trash. If I recall correctly, the motivational speaker J. Christ once advised against “pouring new wine into old wineskins.”
There’s one CGI scene that I think is brilliant; type “First Man moon landing” into YouTube and you will find it. “First Man” is a dull movie; both me & my cowatcher fell asleep during it. But the moon lading scene is so good. It’s using CGI to show us how spectacular the Moon is, and how terrifying it would be to try and land a flimsy, jerry-rigged spaceship/U-Haul trailer on the Moon. (You can see the Apollo 11 landing craft in the Smithsonian: it’s got like fucking Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil on it. And we told college graduates, “park this thing on another planet. Hope you don’t die. Best wishes!”)
It would not be as good a scene with miniatures and models! The level of detail in the CGI adds to the story, it’s not to draw attention to itself. So of course the movie bombed, even though it has one great scene that’s better than anything in 99% of movies.
CGI’s just another color of paint on the pallette; the same way color film is, or widescreen lenses, or synched sound, for that matter. It’s all about what you do with it. And if what you do with it is imaginative and new, you can get great results. If what you do with it is boring, then it’s like hiring Van Gogh to put base white with a roller on your drywall. There’s gifted artists out there, Hollywood, use them! Unfortunately, Hollywood does not think my suggestions are ideal. Their loss.
A good example is Guillermo del Toro. He’s always working with huge budgets now. But even if he didn’t, it would work because he’s incredibly creative. On Bsky, every Saturday, he posts video of some sculpture he’s doing. The problem is, the money people don’t like creativity. They want commodities.
That’s a thing I’ve found, when I do a little bit of research into old movies for my blog. Studio execs have, always, been giant fucking morons. And total cowards — they wouldn’t touch Herman Mankiewicz’s script, “Mad Dog of Europe,” about Hitler, because they didn’t want to lose the German market. It’s exactly the same today.
Hollywood has always been Hollywood — praising itself for how daring and gutsy it is, while being the most chickenshit bunch of gutless “pass the buck” corporate fools you could imagine.
In Kitty Green’s “The Assistant” (a horror movie in its own way), we see the assistant printing out like 10 copies of a script for 10 different studio execs. Fucking MBA grads, without a creative bone in their bodies, all making suggestions on a script that maybe a person with a soul actually cared about and put their heart iinto. Like the dumbest, dullest test audience ever. Except that test audiences actually WANT to see a movie for free. I doubt most modern studio execs even LIKE movies. They just want content they can sell and re-sell. Don Siegel was right; they really are the pod people.
That’s exactly right. And that’s why they move from industry to industry. Or they used to. Today, they are probably too full of themselves to work outside.