OCTOPUS 2 (2002) It only makes Octopus 1 look better Octopus surprised me by not sucking - it looked like a total crap direct-to-video cheesefest and it was actually a pretty fun direct-to-video cheesefest. For a while, its sequel seemed set to similarly catch me pleasantly off guard, but it wasn't long before it sunk into Python/Boa/Crocodile territory. Octopus 2 is that total crap direct-to-video cheesefest I feared - but avoided - with Octopus 1. After an awful prologue featuring a man and a woman dragged to their deaths by a couple of tentacles, Octopus 2 shapes up for a while as a routine but pretty well-done cop movie involving the NYPD's scuba squad. I don't know if the NYPD really has a scuba squad, but I'll give this movie the benefit of the doubt. The movie was filmed in Russia (or so I'm guessing from all those -ov's in the credits) but so far as fakejobs go, it's not bad. Fredric Lane is the senior officer who's one week away from a transfer to a safer job (bwa ha ha), and Michael Reilly Burke is his protégé, who screws up his first assignment royally. Later, an aide to the mayor (Meredith Morton) factors in, serving for now to ask them the mayor's question about the case (the biggest fireworks display ever is but days away and there'll be 20,000 boats in the harbor). Fredric Lane is charismatic and funny, Morton is cute, and the CGI on the octopus ranges from expectedly bad, to pretty good. Things seem set for Octopus 2 to unravel as an enjoyable time killer. Things don't work out that way. Lane's death is probably the most obvious point from which it's all downhill. It's not just that the movie chooses to knock off the only character with a whiff of personality - it's partly the attack itself. These tentacle attacks are pathetic. I haven't seen anything this limp since the last time I saw Tom Cruise making out with a chick. They're basically big rubber tentacles waved around randomly, while the poor cast struggles against them. And since you can't really wave a rubber tentacle around very well underwater, you can imagine how lame the (frequent) underwater attacks are. The octopus itself is a mix of those rubber tentacles, a mostly motionless cephalopod that rises (or not) out of the water, and the occasional CGI shot of a mouth protruding from its mouth, which on closer inspection, looks totally different as an underwater animatronic contraption. This octopus is so big that it can swallow people whole, but it still has trouble killing them, often struggling with them for minutes on end. Meanwhile the plot is your standard stuff where the cop cries octopus and nobody believes him, the chief even ordering him to undergo a psych evaluation (is the chief supposed to be in the room during this?). Of course nobody believes him - it's a movie about a giant octopus! In a movie like this, there's nothing you can say, no evidence you can possibly present, to convince the mayor that a giant octopus is going to ruin the fourth of July, until he actually gets eaten by the octopus (which doesn't happen). This flogs on for most of the movie. There's a dream sequence where the octopus pulls off the Statue of Liberty's head, lots of pseudo-science and pseudo-geography, some woman in old-age makeup for some reason, and an out-of-nowhere kinda nasty scene where the cops smash the shit out of a homeless guy's few possessions to get him to talk. As if things hadn't fallen apart enough already, the climax throws in Morton and a busload of children (one of which is handicapped and is, presumably, Doing Her Best) in a totally pointless collapsed-tunnel rescue, which gives rise to THREE "races against time" which turn out to be not against anything. A fireball must be outrun, but it blows itself out before it singes anything. The kids have to get to the back of the bus to get away from falling ceiling chunks, which ultimately would've hurt only the driver. Then they all have to climb on the seat to avoid the rising water which has an electrical cable whipping about in danger of zapping it - which never happens. I can't help but feel partly responsible for this. One or two people might actually have listened to me when I recommended the first Octopus, rented it, and contributed to the suits' notion that hey, a sequel would be a great idea. Well, the damage is done. I still have fond memories of Octopus. My fondest memory of Octopus 2 is the sad look in the video store girl's eye when I rented it. BACK TO THE O's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE