Back in the early 90s, I rented a movie called The Dark Backward, and I learned a valuable lesson: you can't just make a cult movie. A true cult movie is typically an very earnest movie which has some anomaly or quirk which separates it from the mainstream. These films usually start small, and true to the term "cult", they build a following. When someone sets out to make a cult movie, they usually try way too hard to make things weird and the result is something which is either silly or repugnant. The Syfy Channel has achieved unprecedented success with their Saturday night creature-feature movies, most of which have absurd titles. Something called Sharktopus has cult movie written all over it...unless of course, it's trying to be a cult movie.

Eric Roberts stars in Sharktopus, as Nathan Sands, a genetic researcher who is working with the Navy to make a sea-worthy weapon. The result is a hybrid half shark/half octopus. While demonstrating the creature for the top brass, an accident occurs and Sands, along with his daughter, Nicole (Sara Malakul Lane), his assistant, lose control of the animal -- but they can still track it. The monster heads for Mexico (is it running from the law?), so Nicole and Santos (Julian Gonzoles Espanoza) follow it. They find Andy Flynn (Kerem Bursin), a former associate of Sands', and hire him to help track the creature. But, before they can even prep for their search, the sharktopus begins to kill indiscriminately up and down the coast. Meanwhile, reporter Stacy Everheart (Liv Boughn) and her photographer Bones (Hector Jimenez) get wind of the story and decide that they must have footage of the creature.

Following the success of Jaws, veteran maverick producer Roger Corman decided that he wanted to try and replicate that success and he had Joe Dante (allowing with John Sayles) make Piranha, a movie which became a classic in its own right. Well, here we are, 36 years later, and Corman is apparently still trying to make his own version of Jaws. (Although, in the commentary, Corman claims that Syfy Channel gave him the title “Sharktopus” and asked him to come up with a movie.) To be honest, Sharktopus is a great title, and the creature design is pretty cool. If they made a Sharktopus toy (and it was reasonably priced), I would buy it. However, once you get beyond the title, Sharktopus...well...bites.

Expecting a movie called Sharktopus to have any redeeming features is probably like expecting something called “poop pie” to taste good, but one can always hope. But, from the outset, this is a real stinker, even for this genre. For starters, the movie has zero story. The creature escapes, attacks people, and people try to stop it. All of the characters -- the evil industrialist, the reporter without ethics, the salty local fisherman, the naive scientist -- are all stereotypes. Every moment in the movie is taken directly from every other animal on the loose movie ever made. The sharktopus growls and howls when I’m fairly certain that neither sharks nor octopi can vocalize. And I also don’t think that octopi can stiffen their arms so that they can walk on them, but this doesn’t stop the sharktopus. And the size of the creature varies from scene to scene and at one point, its tentacles seem to be about 40 feet long.

However, the worst part of the movie is the CGI. Again, the sharktopus itself has a cool design (what are those spikes on the side?), but the effects never do it justice. I realize that this is a low-buget Syfy Channel movie, and Corman has never spent a dime that he didn’t have to, but someone could have spent a few more dollars on the CG here. Every time the monster appears, it pulled out of the movie, and this movie didn’t have much of a hold on me to begin with. The creature looks as if it were stuck onto the image like a Coloform and the way in which the scale changes doesn’t help. The movie really hits rock-bottom when the actors are asked to act as if a tentacle is wrapping around them -- their actions and the CG tentacle never match.

In 1984, Italian filmmaker Lamberto Bava (son of legendary director Mario Bava) made a movie called Devil Fish, about a genetically altered creature which was half-shark and half-octopus. The movie has a reputation for being awful and its only contribution to society was a great episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. You would think that someone involved with Sharktopus would have let this serve as a warning, but Corman isn’t one to veer away from a bad idea. If you are content to watch a monster that looks as if it escaped from a PlayStation 2 game eat a bunch of people, then you’ll like Sharktopus. Otherwise, swim away.

Sharktopus makes you wonder what it would take to get people to actually leave the beach on Blu-ray Disc courtesy of Anchor Bay Entertainment. The film has been letterboxed at 1.78:1 and the Disc contains an AVC 1080p HD transfer which runs at an average of 25 Mbps. The image is sharp and clear, as it shows no defects from the source material. There is some mild grain in some shots, but it’s not distracting. What is distracting are the two scenes in which it looks like the lens was dirty. Otherwise, the picture looks good and shows a nice amount of crispness. The colors look very good and the image is never overly dark or bright. The Disc carries a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio track which runs at 48 kHz and an average of 2.9 Mbps. The track provides clear dialogue and sound effects. The surround sound effects work quite nicely, most notably in the attack sequences. While the monster shouldn’t be making any sounds, it’s growls sound good and offer some subwoofer effects. There are some intermittent stereo effects as boats pass by on-screen.

The Sharktopus Blu-ray Disc contains only two extras. We begin with an AUDIO COMMENTARY from Producers Roger Corman and Julie Corman, who are joined by moderator Perry Martin. This is a pretty good commentary, as the two give a nice amount of detail about the making of the film. However, they don’t seem to get how bad this movie is. The only other extra is a TRAILER for the movie.