Octopus (2000)

Best movie of this year hands down!

People are voting emotionally.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

I'm talking about Octopus (2000) Directed by John Eyres and Written by Bose Davidson, and Michael Weiss. Spoiler Alert ahead. The movie is a blend of various types of genera: It starts off as a Government agents fighting terrorists, goes on to become a Submarine drama, and turns into a underwater monster, that carries the title of the movie. The terrorist element is re inserted toward the end, as the bad guys plan to blow up a cruise ship,Jay Harrington plays the agent Roy Turner a field statistician put in harms way, as he is to accommodate the ruthless assassin Casper, played by Ravil Isyanov. They are to be transported by submarine, commanded by the brave Captain Shaw, played by David Beecroft, and his disposable crew. Notably the sexy Karen Lowery as Dr Lisa Finch. and Ricco Ross as Brickman the brave first mate.The movie is very watchable, with satisfactory production values, It is filmed in the style of a TV series. Episodic in general. The movie was at it's best, aside from the outdoor terrorist sequences that open the show, when it played the dynamics between the moral agent, and the ruthless killer.The monster takes the starring role, and that's too bad. The creature effects crew, could not figure out how to get it right, The digital effects in this movie failed to achieve what stop motion pictures like, "It came from Beneath the Sea" (1955) achieved, a believable and coherent giant octopus. The big climatic final shots, failed to impress. By the time all the plot elements pulled together at the finale, the movie had stopped being fun. Four out of Ten, bring your popcorn Stars.

The production is pretty good with this movie. They could have made it into a solid B movie if the dialog wasn't so bad. The one who wrote the script should be shot. The acting wasn't so great either but not sure if this is a side effect of crappy scripting. The actors themselves seemed decent enough, except for the Roy character who constantly over acted the scenes.Special effects were also acceptable for a movie of this type, so they shot themselves in the foot somehow and made this into less of a movie than it could have been.This movie could have been better if they took out all the silly over acting, and put in better dialogs.

There seems to be a lot of cheap marine-based monster movies. I don't exactly know why this is the case but these flicks are rarely anything other than mediocre at best. Octopus is one of the ones from the lower reaches of this scale. It does that thing that most of these films do where you have two concurrent stories happening at the same time. One involves the monster and the other involves a conflict of some sort between good guys and bad guys. This formula is rolled out continually for some reason, maybe it's so that the film can function as a horror/sci-fi film as well as an action/thriller, thereby attracting more people to it. But, the thing is, is that a film called 'Octopus' should really be primarily about a, well, an octopus really. This film, like many of its ilk, sort of forgets about the title creature for too much of the running time and focuses on the other action/thriller plot strand. This is almost always a mistake, and means that these films don't end up delivering what they essentially promise.Octopus is mostly set in a submarine. What I have learned from unfortunate experience is that almost all cheap movies set in a submarine are terrible. The confines of the sub make for dreary and boring scenes. This film is absolutely no different on this score. In actual fact the opening moments on land involving the terrorist attack are verging on being quite good but once we are under water things rapidly worsen. The title monster does eventually pitch up but as you could reasonably expect, he is a creature of bad CGI origins. You really don't see much more usually than a few tentacles and repeated shots. He does seem to change size at will as well so that by the end he is large enough to engulf a cruise ship. This finale, despite being pretty poor is at least the sort of thing you expected to see from the outset, so it's basically OK. But for the rest of it, it consists of not very interesting events surrounding an incredibly annoying terrorist who the heroes, for some unfathomably reason, never actually choose to shoot in the head. Which would have been the correct decision for everyone, viewers included.There is not an awful lot to recommend in Octopus to be perfectly honest. Although if you have seen a few of these types of movies from either the Sci-Fi Channel or The Asylum then you will no doubt not be in the least bit surprised with the contents of this one. It's yet another typical example of this sort of undersea monster dreck I'm afraid. Not enough schlock, too much tedium, sadly.

I like creature features, I'm a fan of movies like Alligator, Piranha, Jaws, Godzilla, King Kong, etc. I bought Octopus for £1, the DVD also had Octopus II, Spiders and Spiders 2 so it was a bargain to get four films for £1. Octopus wasn't that bad, sure it's not going to win any Oscars but it was a fun B-movie. The acting wasn't has bad as some B-movies I've seen, the effects were okay and the Octopus looked effective enough. In parts you could tell they used CGI but it's a low budget creature feature of course the effects are going to be like that. Octopus is a good and fun B-movie monster flick that should be seen. Check this out.