The Movie:

There are those eternal questions that will always plague a certain segment of the populace: which came first, the chicken or the egg? If a tree falls in the woods, does anybody hear it? What is the meaning of life? Is there a God? And maybe most importantly to children of the eighties, who do you like better, Tiffany or Debbie Gibson? For those who weren't there it might seem hard to wrap your head around the cultural monstrosity that was eighties mall chick pop but when these two were at their peaks, you couldn't escape them. Since they sold zillions of records twenty some odd years ago, however, they've evidently fallen on hard times. Tiffany did a Playboy spread and Debbie Gibson recorded with the Circle Jerks (seriously) but neither one of them has ever quite made the comeback happen. So let's credit the good people at The Asylum for doing what they can to bring these two back into the public eye in a monster movie that should have been a whole lot of fun - Mega Python Vs. Gatoroid.

The movie follows our two pop tarts as Dr. Nikki Riley (Debbie Gibson) and Terry O'Hara (Tiffany), an environmentalist and park ranger respectively. Nikki is pretty radical in how she shows her love for the environment, freeing animals and hanging out with snakes, while Terry has to deal gator hunters and giant snakes in the park that she patrols while grieving the loss of her late husband who was killed by one of those very same giant snakes.

When O'Hara, while doing some research, injects some growth hormones into some alligator food in hopes of strengthening up the local gators to the point where they can hold their own against the snakes, things very quickly go bad - you see, the giant snakes eat the gators and benefit from the hormones, while the gators manage to grow larger and eat the snakes and before you know it there are Mega Pythons and Gatoroids duking it out in the middle of the swamp land. Given that Nikki and Terry really don't like each other, what do you figure the odds are of them having to team up to stop the beasts from wreaking havoc across the land? Pretty good, once you get the obligatory cat fight out of the way (which takes place at a fancy buffet and involves some food fighting for good measure).

Mega Python Vs. Gatoroid is amazing in its predictability, but that's about it. You'll know exactly where this formulaic film is going almost as soon as it starts and while the filmmakers definitely deserve some credit for putting together an impressive monster montage of the two warring parties (the snakes and gators, not Tiffany and Debbie Gibson) growing larger and more out of control, this really seems like a wasted opportunity, content to coast by on its novelty casting without much interest in telling an interesting story. On top of that, there's the CGI effects (which make up almost all of the effects work in the movie), which are uniformly awful and which don't do anything to help the film at all.

Monster movie fans could probably look past a lot of these flaws if the movie made up for it some way, somehow, the two most obvious solutions being good old reliable gore and ever popular nudity but while we get a passing bit of the first we get none of the other and what gore there is, well, you guessed it - bad CGI. As such, the film plays it very safe and never even comes close to leaving PG-13 territory. While some of the more recent made for TV/SyFy Channel movies have proven to be good dumb fun, unfortunately this one, which happens to be one of their more anticipated projects, commits the cardinal sin of moviedom - it's boring. There's no suspense, very little character development and no amount of bad CGI and pie to the face cat fight action can cover that up.

Video:

Mega Python Vs. Gatoroid looks okay in this AVC encoded 1080p 1.78.1 widescreen transfer from Image but it's far from amazing. The hokey digital effects stick out like a sore thumb here but that's the way the movie was made and not an issue with the disc itself - though it seems to conflict with some really nice, colorful, crisp cinematography. Colors are nice and bright and bold and well defined and black levels tend to be pretty strong as well. Flesh tones look decent as well and there aren't any problems with compression artifacts outside of a few noticeable spots. Some noise creeps into the picture and haloing is evident frequently. The transfer winds up a very erratic one, sometimes looking very impressive, but falling into some messy territory when things get effects intensive and the best way to describe the picture here is probably inconsistent.