Megalodon (2018)


A military vessel on the search for an unidentified submersible finds themselves face to face with a giant shark, forced to use only what they have on board to defend themselves from the monstrous beast.

REVIEW: Megalodon is Asylum's latest mockbuster, made to cash in on the success of the big budget theatrical The Meg, as they always so expertly do. This actually isn't the first Megalodon-themed movie that The Asylum has released; They've already got an unrelated series of four movies dealing with the title creature battling various different other giant monsters in each one - Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus, Mega Shark vs Mecha Shark, and Mega Shark vs Kolossus.

The first thing I noticed is that while some of the CGI here is atrociously bad, even by Asylum's very low standards, some of it is also quite impressive. The Megalodon shark itself looking quite good and far better than their design of it used for the Mega Shark movies, with far more detail added to it as well. Pretty much any scene with the Megalodon on full display was entertaining to watch, especially during the final 20 minutes or so when it finally comes up to the surface.


Unfortunately, there's surprisingly not a lot of those types of scenes, and I didn't like very much else about this one. There really is far too much time spent on human villains and human drama between cardboard characters we don't care about, played by actors that are just not engaging or very good in the roles. Also, the movie takes itself way too seriously. I love Asylum movies best when they're fun and cheesy, but there's not much fun to be found with this one, outside of a few small scenes, mostly in the last chunk of the movie, which makes the stretches of boring human drama between the shark action feel even more painful.

Asylum movies are usually a fun time, despite their horribly low low budgets. This year in particular has been a mostly-fantastic run for them with their titles. However, this one was mostly dull, boring, took itself too seriously, and didn't give us quite enough engaging giant killer shark action to make up for any of it. They actually throw in some random shots of it just swimming around, in between other scenes that has nothing to do with it, just to make it feel like its actually in the movie more than it is.

 Like always, their poster art is pretty damn rad though. I'd love to have a full-sized poster of that on my wall.


4/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

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