It's been a good six months, about time I bump this and update on my progress!
Sharktopus - As mentioned earlier, it's BAD. However, as I've thought about it more, it occurs to me I that the movie is a straight-up parody of these B Monster flicks...I was probably never meant to give it a serious look in the first place! Probably wasn't the best choice to start out with. ^_^()
[Insert Summer-long hiatus here.]
100 Million BC - A pretty good and surprisingly well-written idea, HORRIBLY executed. The idea was clever (the Philadelphia Experiment resulted in a time travel breakthrough, a team was lost in the '40s and now a Navy SEALs team is being sent back to dinosaur times to rescue them), but the only characters worth caring about were Michael Gross and Greg Evigan's characters (the Scientist and his time-lost brother). The SPFX were really terrible, but I give them kudos for an original design for our star monster, the T-Rex "Big Red", who for once didn't look like a Jurassic Park rip-off! Instead, he sort of reminded me of Diablo from Primal Rage, which I always thought was an awesome design. ^_^
Unfortunately, whatever fun I had in the first two acts falls apart in the third. A friend who I watched it with described the problem as: "This film needed to either get really intimate or really grand in scope at this point. It did neither." The movie literally stops when Big Red finally starts his "rampage", with an extended sequence of the characters "looking" for him in helicopters followed by them "chasing" him on foot (you almost never seeing him during any of this). The resolution was clever, but it took WAY too long getting to that. I want to like this one, but it was pretty disappointing.
Mega Piranha - Wow! This one was awesome! The writing and acting was decent enough, it clearly had some budget, and there's a whole lot of fun to be had. Unlike 100 Million BC, this film doesn't waffle at any point on whether or not to let the scale grow - it starts very small, but by the end it turns EPIC in scale! Our hero is a low-rent Jack Bauer, but that's fine and it works. The villain, a Venezuelan army colonel, is delightfully dastardly in his dogged attempts to both stop the monsters AND our heroes. The SPFX range from hilariously poor to pretty effective, but become awesomely fun as the piranhas reach kaiju size and start causing real mayhem. It was almost as if the filmmakers were reading my mind, 'cause they kept doing exactly what I wanted when I wanted it!
There are a couple of downsides. The Director is trying WAY too hard to mimic Ridley Scott...to the point that the camera NEVER STOPS MOVING. At first it's annoying, but after a while it became somewhat charming...but, if you hate shaky cam, you're not going to like it. Another issue is the finale. The movie does a great job building up in scale, from opening with a couple swimmers getting eaten in a remote Venezuelan river to by the ending all of Southern Florida under siege. Unfortunately, it drops the ball on the military response...for whatever reason, they decided having our hero join Navy SEAL scuba divers swim around and shoot machine guns under water at giant piranhas was a good idea...it just kinda slows the film down right at the moment it should've been the most exciting. The ride up until then is so much fun, though, I can easily overlook that. ^_^
So far, I'd say this is the movie that comes the closest to capturing the spirit of old school Giant Monster films. I honestly wouldn't mind popping it in again to watch right now, which simply cannot be said for either Sharktopus or 100 Million BC.
Dinocroc vs. Supergator - I had hoped to watch Dinocroc and Supergator before this one, considering it's part 3 in the series, but oh well. This one was also a lot of fun, and thanks to David Caradine easily provides the best performances of the four films I've watched so far. I liked that this one immediately cut to the chase and shoved both monsters on screen within the first 5 minutes, full-on rampaging with screaming crowds fleeing from them. Unfortunately, we don't get as much of that as we should, but whenever either monster is on screen it's a lot of fun.
The plot for this one also makes the most sense of the four, it's pretty simple and straightforward: evil CEO takes his lucrative GM food program and tries to apply it to animals, hoping to find military applications, and things go wrong. As with Sharktopus, however, our main characters are pretty annoying: a secret agent for the Department of Agriculture (my God, he's the lamest spy EVER) and a fairly useless Fish & Game officer. The only heroes I liked were the supporting ones, the local Sheriff (Fish & Game lady's dad) and a Cajun Gator hunter brought in by Caradine to clean up the mess (after a team of mercenaries fails). There's also an evil British henchwoman for Caradine who gets offed in...perhaps the most sensible non-eaten way possible, surprising for a movie like this.
To my delight, the fight between the two monsters lasts a few minutes (I honestly expected seconds), with the two utilizing some interesting moves, though the fight still feels held back due to budget concerns. It also ends rather...abruptly. I also don't like how they off the victor, it just feels kind of like a let down. The whole ending seems pretty abrupt: fight ends, get rid of remaining characters, END!
Overall, though, I enjoyed this one. I definitely want to pick up at least Dinocroc, then I'll probably give this another shot.
Rankings Thus Far:
1. Mega Piranha
2. Dinocroc vs. Supergator
3. Sharktopus
4. 100 Million BC
UP NEXT: Dinoshark, Megashark vs. Giant Octopus, and Megashark vs. Crocosaurus