Friday Night Fights--Sharktopus Style!!

This Saturday night, SyFy (sigh) will be launching the greatest event in the history of humankind, with the debut of their latest "SyFy Original" movie, SHARKTOPUS.

Now, no one more than I loves the weekly tradition of SyFy taking either a natural disaster or a wild animal and adding "Mega" to the name; finding one actor with a tenuous science fiction media connection and surrounding them with unknown Europeans with indecipherable accents (and indecipherable acting); wrapping the whole enterprise in special effects that 5-year-old me could have bettered with a Lite Brite and a stop-motion camera; and then dropping the turd on undiscerning Saturday audiences who can't be bothered to wait for it to turn up 5 minutes later on Netflix. Hey, it's just part of SyFy's hidden agenda to make EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE WORLD DUMBER. Why change the channel, because there's nothing else on...

But Sharktopus? I can top that...

For this week's Friday Night Fight, rabbit ronin Miyamoto Usagi is wandering about feudal Japan, when:




Now, we've got the octopus...and not just any octopus:



That's it then, right?

No, because this is an octopus DEMON:


Well, things couldn't get any worse, could they?

YIPES!!! And there's our shark!!

How to get out of this one??



OK, stabbing the shark and riding his dying body to the surface is a good start...



And slicing the heck out of the octopus is a good finish!!

An as the shark and the octopus slowly sink, Spacebooger suggests you enjoy the trailer for SHARKTOPUS:



Even though I didn't have Eric Roberts sliming up the screen, Stan Sakai's writing and drawing and inking and lettering clearly carry the day in Usagi Yojimbo #27 (1991).

Now go vote, dang it, before SyFy unleashes, oh, I don't know, HYPER HAILSTORM or GIGA-NEWT or MANSQUITO 2 or something...

How NOT to remake a high-spirited, swash-buckling action serial:

A) Have 80% of it take place on Earth in a boring small town

B) Set Mongo in a basement somewhere (with railings!) The dimmer the lighting, the better!

C) Have the first 45 minutes be a slow, lame X-Files knock-off, up to and including making Zarkoff a Lone Gunmen

D) Have the first alien we see be a frakkin' Borg rip-off, and then have him do a T2 ripoff with Mom on the phone, WITH THE EXACT SAME TIP-OFF THE T1000 GAVE JOHN CONNER!!)

E) Have Ming be a boring ass businessman...controlling Mongo with hauling fees for water?!?! That's J.R. Ewing, not Ming the Merciless

F) Have our "hero" do nothing particularly heroic the whole movie

G) DON'T HAVE A BLOODY HAWKMAN IN THE WHOLE THING!!

H) Keep using the Queen music the in commercials but not in the actual show

I) Hire lots of Canadian actors who say "aboot"

J) Make all your female leads look exactly alike, so you can't even tell when they pull the old concubine switch

K) Make the whole thing stupider than the stupidest stupid thing in Stupidsylvania