{"id":12277,"date":"2022-03-28T17:06:51","date_gmt":"2022-03-28T21:06:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pley2win.com\/featured-news\/mega-shark-vs-giant-octopus-how-the-asylum-made-it-in-12-days\/"},"modified":"2022-03-28T17:06:51","modified_gmt":"2022-03-28T21:06:51","slug":"mega-shark-vs-giant-octopus-how-the-asylum-made-it-in-12-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pley2win.com\/?p=12277","title":{"rendered":"Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus: How The Asylum made it in 12 days"},"content":{"rendered":"


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The 1979 war film Apocalypse Now<\/em> is infamous for going over budget, over schedule, and over the top to appease director Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s every demand. 2009\u2019s Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus <\/em>is infamous for … the exact opposite reasons. Pumped through the direct-to-video company The Asylum\u2019s \u201cmockbuster\u201d pipeline for a fraction of a fraction of the cost of a typical tentpole, the movie delivers just enough to validate the marquee-friendly title. Today, Apocalypse Now <\/em>is revered as one of the great American films. Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus <\/em>floats through streaming libraries and provides the internet with big floppy CG shark memes. But was pulling it off any less of a feat than Coppola\u2019s blood-sweat-and-tears epic? <\/p>\n

Someone has to treat the Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus<\/em>es like their own personal Apocalypse Now<\/em>, and writer-director Jack Perez was up for such a challenge. His early work in the 1990s, shooting behind-the-scenes documentaries on the sets of Carlito\u2019s Way<\/em>, The Flintstones<\/em>, and Hard Target<\/em>, eventually put him on the radar of Sam Raimi, who hired him to direct Hercules<\/em>\u2019 backdoor pilot for Xena. <\/em>By then Perez had directed an indie feature, the found-footage-before-found-footage-was-a-thing horror flick America\u2019s Deadliest Home Video, <\/em>had stop-motion animation skills in his back pocket, and knew his way around a commercial set. The future was bright enough; Perez spent the \u201990s and 2000s bouncing between indie features and gigs-for-hire like Wild Things 2<\/em> and MTV\u2019s TV movie Monster Island<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus<\/em>, which finds a team of oceanographers scrambling to kill two underwater kaiju by luring them into a tentacle-flapping, jaw-snapping fight, <\/em>was not a passion project. But when Perez signed on, he wanted it to be good \u2014 even if the Debbie Gibson-led creature feature was just another cog in The Asylum\u2019s notorious business model. And it seemed to have worked; the movie\u2019s low-rent visual effects and stilted drama mesmerized internet kids, prompting Asylum to produce several Mega Shark sequels. Before the hyper-self-aware gimmicks of Sharknado<\/em> (also an Asylum joint), there was Perez funneling his monster-movie memories from the 1970s into cheapo popcorn entertainment.<\/p>\n

What did it take to get an Asylum movie wrapped and in the can? Out of morbid curiosity, I phoned Perez to talk about the making of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.<\/em><\/p>\n

[Ed. note:<\/strong> This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.]<\/p>\n

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Image: The Asylum<\/cite><\/p>\n

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How did you wind up making <\/strong>Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus <\/strong><\/em>for The Asylum?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jack Perez: <\/strong>I\u2019ve always bounced between independent films and more commercial work, depending on what opportunities are presented. The Asylum didn\u2019t used to be a low-budget schlock factory \u2014 they were originally a distributor of independent movies, if you can believe it. The people there had distributed my second feature called The Big Empty<\/em>, which was like a character-driven noir. They knew me from that, so when the company became this mockbuster schlock factory, they were looking for directors who could do stuff on a really tight, Roger Corman-style schedule. So if I was ever really low on money or a gig fell through or whatever, I was happy to jump in and do one of these nutty movies. <\/p>\n

I had been in preparation to do a more personal movie, a bigger budget movie that I had been prepping for a year, and it was ready to go and I was casting and then as it happens, so often in Hollywood, all the financing fell apart. I found myself like, \u201cOh, shit, how am I going to pay the rent?\u201d So I picked up the phone and called The Asylum and said, \u201cWhat do you got? I need something for this month.\u201d They said, \u201cWell, can you write and direct a \u2018versus\u2019 monster movie in a couple of weeks and shoot in a couple of weeks?\u201d And I was like, \u201cYes, of course!\u201d <\/p>\n

How did you land on Mega Shark and Giant Octopus? Where do you start on a movie like this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have a long love of monster movies \u2014 the films of Ray Harryhausen, King Kong, and, all the Godzilla movies were things that I was raised on as a kid. So it\u2019s very easy for me to sort of open up that reservoir and reconstitute all those tropes and things that I love into whatever was necessary. <\/p>\n

But at the time, The Asylum basically had a distribution deal for VHS and DVD. Basically the distributor said, \u201cWe need a \u2018versus\u2019 monster movie, can you guys do that kind of thing?\u201d They said yes, and basically turned to someone like me to do it. At the time, they just had \u201cMega shark vs. Giant Squid\u201d on paper \u2014 I don\u2019t know if that came from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea<\/em>. But then as I was writing it, they were like, \u201cNo, it\u2019s an octopus,\u201d which didn\u2019t really change it very much. The whole idea of \u201cMega versus Giant\u201d is essentially taking Jaws and making it 500 feet tall. Because there was already a subgenre of shark movies in the wake of Jaws<\/em> \u2014 Mako: The Jaws of Death<\/em>, Tintorera: Killer Shark<\/em>, Orca<\/em>, and all that kind of stuff \u2014 it was something that was known. And, I didn\u2019t know about this at the time, but there have been documented actual undersea battles between sharks and octopus on occasion!<\/p>\n

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