During the cold war, American soldiers attack a submarine carrying chemicals for biological warfare. As a result of the attack, the submarine sinks down to the bottom of the sea and a couple of large canisters of the chemicals are spilled out. 35 years after, we are transferred in Bulgaria where one of the leading world terrorists enters a US Embassy, as is easy as he would go into a coffee shop and plant a bomb. His "clever" disguise as an old lady proves to be effective and without any problems he leaves the building which soon after blows up. The only surviving US Embassy employees are a plain office clerk and an experienced agent that go after the terrorist. They apprehend him, but the agent dies in the process. The clerk gets the starring role.
The big shots back in the States are furious with the situation and they see the only secure (?) way of transferring the terrorist from Bulgaria is via a submarine captained by renegade solider Jack Shaw. Accompanied by the office clerk, the terrorist boards the submarine and they are off to the US.
I usually don't like to discuss the movie in details, but Octopus is one of those exceptions that you really need to describe to the potential viewers. In the same time the submarine dives away, friends of the terrorist are setting up a "sleeper cell" of their men on the luxury cruise ship. The idea is that if the terrorist can break loose, he will send a signal to his companions and the cruise ship would cross the submarine path and save him from the submarine. In a galaxy far far away, things like this could happen, but not on this planet.
 
As usual with these kind of creature feature movies, especially the ones coming from Nu Image, you have a lot of action build a top of human interaction and just a small part of the whole experience is connected to the actual mutant animal. In this case we have an octopus that was mutated with the use of anthrax spilled 35 years ago and now, because of the mutation, she lacks sugar in the blood and therefore is extremely violent and hungry. I swear, I didn't make this up, it came as result of the tests done by a female scientist that is aboard the submarine. Of course she is a cute blond smarty - we all know the typical female scientist in a B horror movie. Btw, because of some strange scenario mishaps, in the beginning she talks with the typical russian-english accent, while 10 minutes afterwards she completely looses it and talks as she is an USA native. This is just a sample of scenario problems that can be seen in almost every minute of the movie.
The other members of the cast are trying to show the best of their abilities, but overall it looks pretty much like a true B or even C grade movie. This combined with the overall state of the script which is full of funny comments and extra cool reactions in some pretty bad situations, makes Octopus a movie perfect to watch in a companion of your drunken mates.
As regarding the Octopus action, she is of course CGI all the way and besides roaring around, we are under the impression that she can see with her "arms". Besides this, some of her attacks on the submarine are clearly in complete opposition to the rules of physics. The final moments of the giant octopus attacking a cruiser is breathtaking - not.
It is not easy to rate a movie like Octopus. I had to go with the rating relating to the overall state of the movie (2/10), but had to lift it one step to 3/10 because it could be interesting to fans of bad creature feature movies. I am one of them, and while I like good horror movies, there are times when movies like this get the prime place in my viewing queue. Some movies are just plain bad, and they don't fit in the "fun bad" category, but "Octopus" is surely one of the better bad movies.
If you are a regular movie lover, don't waste a second on "Octopus", you would most probably be more interested in the re-runs of the TV series where Hulk Hogan owned a big boat.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE: Dead Eye Six
MOVIE YEAR: 2000
DIRECTOR: John Eyres
WRITING CREDITS: Boaz Davidson, Michael D. Weiss
GENRE: Horror, Thriller, Action
CAST: Jay Harrington, Ravil Isyanov, David Beecroft
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 100 min
RATING: 3/10
Octopus Website/IMDB Click here
Octopus Trailer
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