It Should Have Been on Masterpiece Theater

When the Boss sent me to Wal*Mart to locate a copy of the Academy Award winning epic picture Ace Ventura Pet Detective, I had no idea how lucky I would be. We had been wondering if watching Jim Carrey talk through his *** would cause 13 year old General Mayhem to laugh so hard that he wet his pants like he did when he watched Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when he was three. I could not locate Ace’s first movie, but while digging through the $5 bin I did locate a title that I had never heard of and just barely resisted buying. I am writing, of course, about Deborah Gibson’s 2009 classic Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus. How can you not watch a film about a gigantic prehistoric shark and an equally large octopus that come back to life after having been frozen in the arctic ice cap for centuries? Because we all know how often frozen animals are reanimated.

Monday morning I turned on the TV and guess what I found playing on the ScyFy channel? Nothing other than Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus. Both the Captain and the Major snuggled underneath a blanket next to me on the couch for a wonderful moment of father-son-daughter movie bonding. Unfortunately, we missed the good parts, like the scene where Mega Shark jumps out of the water to catch in its mouth a jumbo jet cruising at 30,000 feet and bring it back to earth, although I’m still wondering why the water reentry didn’t cause a tsunami. I mean, how unrealistic is that?! We did get to see Giant Octopus swat a jet fighter out of the air, while Mega Shark bit a Navy destroyer in half! That’s one mega shark!

Then something really scary happened. The Boss called me upstairs to look at the haircut she had just given to General Mayhem. We all know what happened the last time she took scissors in hand. The hair cut was good, but the next words to escape her mouth truly perplexed me.

“Take a seat. You’re next.”

“But, Mega Shark is about to fight Giant Octopus!” I protested.

“Sit,” she replied.

“He just took a bite out of the Golden Gate Bridge! I can’t miss this!”

“Like I care.”

I was a bit shaggy, so I sat down, mumbling about the injustice of it all.

“Those are dangerous words when I have a pair of scissors in my hand,” she warned.

Then she told me to stop checking her out while she cut my hair. Talk about feeling cheated! I couldn’t watch Mega Shark and I couldn't watch Giant Octopus and I couldn’t check out the Gazongas, either. That is my favorite haircut past time. She asked me how I wanted my hair cut.

“Just make me look like one of the guys who turns your head on the street,” I answered.

So, she tried to cut off my love handles. Then Major Havoc came upstairs to inform me that Mega Shark had just bitten off one of Giant Octopus’ tentacles.

It was a tough morning.

We had just completed the hair cut when Mega Shark and Giant Octopus slowly sank to the bottom of the ocean, dead, and I didn’t get to see it. It was at that moment that General Mayhem discovered that check-in time for space camp was at 2:00 p.m., 3 ½ hours away in Hutchinson, Kansas, and our kitchen clock read 12:45 p.m. Before I had a chance to take a shower and wash those tiny hair particles off the back of my neck and shoulders I was in the car for the long itchy trip I wrote about yesterday. When I returned home last night I could not find a repeat of Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus on this week’s TV listings.

What a rip.

That’s okay. Deborah Gibson and Tiffany are currently filming Mega Python Versus Gatoroid. It’s due out next year. I see a family trip to the theater in our future…