Anticipation has been building for The Asylum’s DVD release next week of MEGA SHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS, ever since the trailer started working its way around the web (you can check it out at the bottom of this page). Writer/director Jack Perez got in touch with some exclusive comments and behind-the-scenes photos from the movie, which pits Lorenzo Lamas and former ’80s singing sensation Deborah Gibson (in first photo with Perez) against the pair of monstrous denizens of the deep…
Same thing with the Golden Gate Bridge attack, the colored-liquid laboratory montage and the shark chewing on a nuclear sub that manages to slip away. Super-silly. None of it fully satisfies, but all of it (including the supremely hokey dialogue and reused sets) hopefully evokes the fun of the Saturday-afternoon monster matinee—everything from IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA to REPTILICUS to KING KING VS GODZILLA. Actually, the film I had in my head most of the time was GODZILLA VS. MEGALON—largely because of its one-sheet, which showed the two titular beasts duking it out atop the World Trade Center (clearly stolen from the ’76 KING KONG finale). The film itself offers no such battle; as I recall, they’re never even in New York! But the promise of spectacle was unmatched.
I wanted to create that feeling, even if the demands of MSvsGO’s story were really too great for the limited FX budget and 12-day shooting schedule. Even the simplest expository scenes were daunting. How do you shoot a half-eaten whale washed up on a beach? Full-sized prop? Forget about it. CGI? Sure. But again, I wanted to keep the silliness in play, so I decided to go with a forced-perspective gag. When you see Deborah Gibson and her fellow marine biologists saunter up to a decapitated sperm whale (a nod to JAWS 2, where the characters find a munched-up orca), I had a very talented modelmaker whip up a 5-foot-long foam-rubber miniature, which I dragged down to the beach location and set up on a table covered in the same sand. I sent the actors a block away toward the water’s edge, lined up the two elements through the lens and voilà! Pure Super 8-ery. Fakey, but kinda cool. Hopefully.
Who knows, maybe I should lay off the virtually obsolete FX techniques. When I made MONSTER ISLAND for MTV a few years back, I used stop-motion animation for all the radioactive-insect battles. I wanted to pay tribute to that lost form, from the beauty of the original KONG and THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD to the slightly-more-jerkiness of DINOSAURUS! and the LAND OF THE LOST TV series. Still, I got some viewers complaining, “Hey, those effects look fake! The creatures aren’t scary!” Jeez, you’d think the fact that the movie starred Carmen Electra and the brilliant Adam West would be indication enough.
