Corman Teases “Sharktopus”

A couple of weeks ago, we brought you news that SyFy has brought in legendary B-movie director Roger Corman to helm their original movie “Sharktopus.”

For weeks, we’ve had speculation about what exactly the movie would entail both on our web site and in the voice mail show.  But now Corman is offering a few more details inside the world of “Skartopus.”

For starters, Corman says SyFy came to him with the title in mind and then asked him to build a movie around it.

“They liked the title,” Corman said. “I wasn’t so certain about the title, but they talked me into it, and I said, ‘OK.’ The logic you can go with is that if there’s a shark today, there had to be a prehistoric shark. But there is no such thing as a half-shark and half-octopus. I was faced with an entirely different problem, because, as I say, there was some sort of insane logic to the first three. So I had to come up with an idea that would make sense, and I felt, ‘OK, now we have to go into bioengineering. The sharktopus has to be created. This can no longer be just the later development of a prehistoric creature.'”

Corman said that the title creature is created by a bio-engineering outfit hired by the Navy to deal with a problem.

“There are Somali pirates or terrorists operating in local waters in small boats,” Corman said. “The Navy has the assignment to wipe out these Somali pirates and/or destroy the boats of these terrorists, but they cannot send in a Navy ship, because that would be a violation of territorial waters. But they’ve got to get these guys. So Blue Water has been given the assignment to create a super-deadly but controllable—through electronic implants in its brain—creature that’s half-shark and half-octopus and can go in the waters where we’re not supposed to be.”

“The creature can use its tentacles to grab the boat and overturn it, and the shark eats the pirates or the terrorists,” Corman said. “Now, that was my solution. And it almost makes sense. Clearly, it doesn’t not make sense, but there’s that willing suspension of disbelief. If someone has turned on Sharktopus, they want to see Sharktopus, but they want some explanation as to how this thing was created. That was my solution, and that’s what we’re doing. So those Somali pirates had better be very careful in the next few months.”

And should the movie be successful, Corman says that fans could look forward to a battle royal between Sharktopus and Dinoshark. It’s one of several projects Corman is pursuing when production on this project ends.

“The chances are 100 percent that you will get Dinocroc vs. Supergator, putting together the first two,” Corman said. “That we know; we’re working on that right now. If people like it, we’ll probably do Dinoshark vs. Sharktopus. Now, there is such a thing as playing a cycle too long. You have to know when to step away.”