Octopus 2: River of Fear (Michael Reilly Burke, Meredith Morton) no gummy bears
If imitation automatically translated into homage, then Octopus 2: River of Fear would be one of the most stirring tributes to Steven Spielberg’s breakthrough smash Jaws ever made. For starters, you’ve got a cop who’s determined to convince a headstrong mayor that there is a deadly underwater creature about to cause tremendous damage on unsuspecting visitors during the fourth of July weekend, and then there is the similar conflict where no one will look the evidence plainly in the eye. Alas, Octopus 2 is about as far from a respectable dedication imaginable, and from cheesy stem to sullen stern it is without a doubt one of the dreariest monster movies ever made.
The hackneyed story begins with a couple out for a drunken late night boat ride and they end up as octo-bait. Naturally, a lone drifter, sad, grisly and misunderstood, is the only witness to the event. Cut to up and coming NYC police detective Nick Hartfield (Michael Reilly Burke), who has just botched an undercover drug bust when he accuses a supreme court judge of trafficking (though he is seemingly fishing in the East River?!?). His veteran partner Walter (Fredric Lehne) has, naturally, requested a transfer to a desk job and only has “one last case” before he can switch departments. Suffice to say, we know Walter’s fate ten minutes into the flick.
After Nick and Walter uncover the remains of the octopus attack, the mayor’s assistant Rachel (Meredith Morton) hits the scene and starts asking a lot of questions. With few sufficient answers, the dynamic SCUBA duo head to an underground refuge for homeless people who play the violin and have well-furnished cubicles. Nick is reluctant to believe the lone drifter’s story that it’s an octopus responsible for all the shenanigans. That night, the cephalopod lashes out on a boat that eventually explodes, but not before we are treated to some shots of rubber tentacles that are clearly suspended by cables and a hokey shot of a neon yellow cat’s eye staring back at us through a misty porthole.
And so it goes. There’s never any explanation for the enormous octopus, including what it’s doing there (except to say that it “must have come from Nova Scotia”), and no one ever thinks to phone someone else in New York City who might be a specialist on this kind of thing. Of course, we are treated to a scene when a dozen school kids are put in peril, and naturally a child in a wheelchair is the one most at risk. To cement the movie’s badness, there’s even a dream sequence where the octopus is depicted wreaking havoc on the Statue of Liberty.
Ordinarily, I’m all for B movies as long as there’s a few laughs along the way. I don’t mind if movies like Octopus 2: River of Fear reek of terrible effects and corny dialogue, but they have to be at least marginally interesting to justify sitting through them. It would take eight tentacles restraining me to get me to sit through this movie again, and even then I would most likely be doing everything in my power to try to break free.
