Monster Movie Mayhem: Aquarium of the Dead

By CONNOR KEATING

Tiger Media Network

For the final review for the 2024 October monster movie marathon, we have the scariest film of them all. A film from a company that makes any moviegoer shudder just by its name alone. “The Asylum” presents “Aquarium of the Dead”… also I’m writing this in the middle of September because I refuse to watch this movie again, especially just a month later.

“Aquarium of the Dead” is the third film in the “Zoombies” franchise. While I have not seen the other two films, I’ve heard that the second is a prequel and this film takes place at the same time as the first one. I’ve also heard they’re very bad movies. 

The film takes place at an aquarium where uh… Some sort of medical treatment item for the animals goes bad and after injecting it into an octopus, it begins spreading a virus around the aquarium. The virus turns all the animals undead so now they’re all big and crazy and deadly. It’s not well explained at all. Anyway, the main characters get locked inside the aquarium because one of the tanks broke and that apparently locks all the doors, so now they have to find a way out and try not to get eaten by the creatures of the undead aquarium!

Something has caused the dead dolphin to come back to life!

Yeah, the plot sucks. Now I will give the film some credit, it gets straight into the action. The first thing we “see” is the octopus getting turned into a zombie… unfortunately, most of that is off camera… as in, it happens right outside of the frame. Now, despite the quick opening, a good chunk of the rest of the film is just people standing around in an aquarium and talking, with very little going on and nothing important to say. 

The film has three groups of characters. The first is the head of the aquarium, the aquarium vet, a politician that they’re trying to get funding from, and his secretary. Then there’s this aquarium employee guy and a random dude who I think is getting some kind of special tour of the place or something. And then, finally, there are these two… firefighters or paramedics or something guys who just wander around the building the entire time and add absolutely nothing to the film. I honestly think the movie wasn’t long enough, so they added these two guys in just to make the movie like, ten minutes longer. 

There’s also this one lady who has been in some actual big films, most notably “Cool Cat Saves The Kids,” but she spends most of the film in one room until the climax, where she shows up just to get eaten by the octopus. It’s a pretty bland cast. The main four are extremely boring and the politician guy is, of course, very annoying. Now, the aquarium employee and the random guy do have some… not necessarily good, but fun back and forth. Better dialogue than anything else in the film, but they’re still not very interesting. The film also can’t decide which one is supposed to be the smart one and which one is the dumb one, so they go back and forth constantly. They’re surprisingly the best part of the film, but still suck.

The way that the film is structured is also a total mess and the film is pretty poorly edited. The characters are constantly running through the same hallways and areas over and over again. At one point around the beginning of the film, the group of four gets trapped in some room, we cut to the dynamic duo while they fight crabs or something, and then when we get back to the others, they’re suddenly out… and then a while later they get stuck in that same room again! It seriously feels like they took one sequence and split it in half and stuck each end of it at different ends of the movie. As stated earlier, while the film begins immediately, after that the film grinds to a screeching halt. It’s a very slow movie where barely anything happens throughout, and when something does happen, half of the time, it’s the same shot of this CGI crocodile doing the same walking animation over and over and over again.

Dr. Karen James fails to sneak past the zombified mako sharks!

Speaking of the animals, let’s talk about them. The fact that they’re zombies has almost zero bearing on the plot. You might be wondering, “Do the people turn into zombies?” no! Of course not! That would require them to spend money on one of those zombie makeup kits you get from “Michael’s.” Honestly, they could have just said the animals got some disease like rabies but for fish or that it’s radiation, but no, they have to make a big deal about the animals being “undead” even though it means literally nothing. So what sort of animals do we get as zombies? 

Well, the main beast is the octopus. He gets by far the most dynamic range of animation, but because of this, he spends most of the film growling at people from the air vents. Even when he does something, though, it’s really not that interesting. The one time the paramedic guys interact with the actual plot is when one of them gets stuck in an elevator with the octopus, and the movie doesn’t even have the guts to do anything with that. He just screams at the octopus for a bit, and then gets off on the next floor. Anyways, there’s the crocodile, as mentioned before. He shows up a lot but does nothing, there’s one scene of a dolphin that kills a guy in the medical area, it’s actually a fun “so bad it’s good” kind of scene, but then the dolphin never shows up again, there’s also a blind zombie walrus who gets a single kill, there are some giant crabs, some vampire starfish, and we do get a scene where the characters have to walk past two beached sharks in the most anticlimactic scene ever that simply there to waste time. 

Honestly I would have liked to see more fish or something rather than the same crocodile constantly. They literally have one of the tanks break open and flood and room then do nothing with that. There are a lot of animals, but most of them are in very brief and mediocre scenes, and a good chunk of them have monster movies of their own. I wish there would have been more interesting animals attacking like the giant crabs and starfish. Those guys were interesting, octopus, sharks, and crocodiles all have their own movies, and seeing animals that would normally be harmless being bloodthirsty is kind of the draw for a film like this.

Daniel Hanley gets pinned down by a giant spider crab!

Like most films from “The Asylum,” “Aquarium of the Dead” sucks. It’s a very nonsensical movie where not much ever happens, and when something does happen, it’s so anticlimactic that it keeps the film from even reaching “so bad it’s good” status. Boring characters that are either talking about nothing or running through the same corridors they ran through a minute ago, and a missed opportunity with its concept that gets wasted on the same killer animals we’ve seen countless times helps to make this a *gasp* bad movie! I give this film two “marine animal stock footage clips” out of ten.

Connor Keating is a senior at Fort Hays State University, studying Natural Resources. Connor is an old-school movie fan, particularly Japanese monster movies, and is an avid DVD collector.

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