This is a movie about a big octopus.
Oh. You guessed that.
The story is fairly simple: some fishermen catch a strange octopus, a really, really big one comes to take it back.
There is more to it than that — the scientists pursuing it for some reason or another, the last surviving fisherman trying to get the youngster back to “Mom” (or “Dad”, whichever) and the old wartime secret hidden in an abandoned top-secret underground laboratory (I keep thinking Nazis, but they were probably Japanese. After all, this is a Chinese Movie).
Mind you, there’s always something happening — car chases, monster action, gun play, and even a cute animal character who would probably be in the toy stores if this were an American film. The Big Octopus looks fairly good and suggests something Cthulhu-esque, but somehow, despite some pretty good elements, the whole is…unsatisfying.
I’m not sure what’s wrong (and maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood for it, or it was the terrible subs — although I really doubt it) but it just doesn’t work.
And, let’s face it, I’d love to know why the bad guys drag the hero around with them, even after they’ve killed off several other characters they didn’t have any use for.
The Chinese film industry has made a few good Science Fiction and Fantasy films lately (although their horror and fantasy films are often crippled by official demands that everything have a material explanation) although on the whole they seem more interested in just trying to do the sort of thing Hollywood does, only not quite as well.
Oh, well, the SyFy Network is always in need of big monster movies, and Big Octopus is not really significantly worse than something like Sand Serpents. Perhaps one of these days they’ll start outsourcing some of their cookie cutter creature features to China instead of getting them from their current bulk manufacturers.
After all, even Roger Corman probably can’t make a Big Octopus movie for what the Chinese can…
rivets on the poster 
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