OCTOPUS (2000) It suckered me in! All right! I just knew one of these movies had to come up a winner, and maybe it's not just coincidence that this one gives its titular animal the least amount of screen time. If, in the coming years, the recent spate of direct-to-video killer-animal movies is remembered at all, Octopus is sure to be remembered as the best of the bunch. Maybe that's not saying much, but it does beat out Komodo, and Komodo was okay, wasn't it? After a Missile Crisis-era intro and a pretty rollicking modern-day chase after a terrorist who bombs an embassy, Octopus mostly takes place on an American submarine, transporting a pretty oceanographer (Carolyn Lowery) and that wily terrorist (Ravil Issyanov) across the Atlantic. Then a giant octopus attacks. Sounds simple enough, but there's actually a lot more plot here; nonsense, sure, but it's a lot of fun. There's a terrorist-jacked cruise ship, some amusing backstories for the characters (the CIA escort doesn't want to be a hero; the sub captain wants to be one all too badly), people cracking up, the ever-present threat of implosion and depleting air, Frost from Aliens, and a really cool (however unlikely) adieu for the villain. All the actors are obviously having a lot of fun, sometimes maybe a little too much fun, like Lowery's inexplicable German accent in her first scene, and I couldn't even count the number of times she flicked her hair away from her face. Issyanov plays it over the top (does he have any motive, any "cause"?) but enjoyably so, aside from his catch-phrase "Not in this lifetime!", which is, well, not very catchy. While the script juggles a number of plot elements (and not a romantic subplot in sight!), the dialogue is often bad ("If he screws this up, I will personally bury him at sea...alive!"), but the cast does their best with it. Though I'd previously noted that the writer for this (Michael D. Weiss) also "contributed" to Hooper's terrible Crocodile, I'm glad I went ahead and saw this anyway. The effects are something of a mixed bag, but overall they're really quite good - the early action on land is all excellent, and once we're at sea, while the constraints of the budget become a little more clear, they never become screamingly obvious. The submarine settings are used to film things mostly from the inside, not the outside of the sub, and while this ain't exactly Das Boot, it ain't half bad. The opening Cold War scene is quite tense, and the rest of the film has a number of exciting scenes. As for the octopus effects, they appear to be almost all CGI, and very good for this movie's budget; not as good as, say, Komodo, but way better than Spiders, Crocodile, Python, and the rest. Its first appearance, about 30 minutes in, is pretty tense too, benefiting by not showing too much of it. Looking at the credits, this movie appears to be filmed in Russia, since about half of the crew's last names end in "-ov". You don't see a lot of movies from out of there these days, do you? Directed by John Eyres, who gives it all a pretty relentless place (well, the film does stop dead in one scene where one crewman tries coaxing another away from cracking up), often demonstrating that he's probably a big fan of Deep Rising, which makes him okay in my book, even if he did make Project: Shadowchaser. Octopus succeeds where the rest of these movies fail; it's fun, and it's fun for the right reasons. How many of these movies can you say that about? They're making sequels to just about all of them, but Octopus is the only one which deserves one. BACK TO THE O's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE