Movies
Sharktopus (V)
“It’s a movie that could have gone the Piranha route, jacking up the blood and gore with every kill, but Sharktopus is a particularly lazy entry in the SyFy repertoire, settling on repetition and an all around sense of general foolishness instead of homegrown creativity.”
Saturday night. 10 p.m. If you have a half-decent cable subscription, your 12-year-old is crouched in the basement watching the most recent contribution to the pantheon of SyFy Channel original movie cheese. Maybe he’s got a few friends with him. Maybe they’re tippling the peach schnapps he swiped from the cupboard above the fridge. It’s a storied SyFy tradition rich in artistic irrelevance, the sort of ingenious weekend programming that has birthed exquisite nonsense like Mansquito and Mega Python Vs. Gatoroid. Frankly, it’s the stuff of adolescent legend.
Sharktopus is yet another addition to the SyFy junior high sleepover panoply. Neither good nor bad, it’s a film that simply delivers what it promises: Eric Roberts, bikinis, and a sharktopus. Engineered by Dr. Eric Roberts and his bookish daughter, the sharktopus is exactly what you’d expect from a SyFy Original: a shitty CGI depiction of an 8-legged, man-eating shark. As Dr. Eric performs a demonstration for the military that funds the project, a relatively dickish Commander Cox bullies Roberts into pushing the sharktopus over its limits. After a collision, the strap from the electrical harness breaks and the sharktopus is suddenly set free. (Sadly, nobody ever bothers to explain how they got that fucking electrical harness on the sharktopus in the first place.)
Rendered in the silliest digital effects imaginable, the sharktopus bears a suspicious resemblance to a toy you’d dig out of a box of cereal. But hey, this is a SyFy original, and that comes with the territory. At least the kill group is primarily restricted to the bikini-clad, which somehow makes the sloppy digital gore more tolerable. The sharktopus munches a cliff-side bungee jumper, scrapes random chicks off the beach with its razor-tipped tentacles, and is just an all-around pain in the scrotum to the marine-loving community. Eric Roberts dispatches his nerdy daughter and a beefcake named Flynn to capture the beast, presumably so Roberts can kick it off-screen on a yacht for most of the film’s running time.
It’s a movie that could have gone the Piranha route, jacking up the blood and gore with every kill, but Sharktopus is a particularly lazy entry in the SyFy repertoire, settling on repetition and an all around sense of general foolishness instead of homegrown creativity. Not that my expectations were especially high. As a SyFy enthusiast, I knew what I was in for. But Sharktopus had the potential to be something truly memorable, a meditative exercise in cinematic cheese, but sadly, it neglected to take full advantage of its supremely ludicrous premise.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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