Idea for a series of bad creature movies

So walking home today for some reason I was thinking about how a lot of bad creature movies begin with someone doing something really stupid.  Sharktopus, for example, begins with a military person of one persuasion or another demanding that testing of the title creature be expanded in a direction not intended for no reason whatsoever during a critical period during which control of the creature is via a vulnerable external device.  He does this in spite of being told, in no uncertain terms, that this is a bad idea and in almost no time flat they can switch over control to the much less vulnerable internal device that is to be the next step.

Of course, if not for the person being stupid, the monster would have never gotten loose and you'd have no movie.

So with Sharktopus as the example in my mind, I considered a different beginning, where someone stood up to the military evaluator, refused to back down, and thus did not have the stupid movie-creating event.

Military guy gets pissed off, shuts down project Sharktopus, cut to later when you have a very much the same scene play out, but with a different absurd creature combination, and this time whoever points out that following military guy's stupid and pointless suggestion is a bad idea eventually back down.  Thus releasing [absurd creature combination] into the oceans.

Team Sharktopus is called on to stop it and you can have a bad creature vs. movie.

-

Now the walk home takes about an hour, perhaps a bit more, and so there was some time to expand on this idea.

First off, bad creature movies are no place for subtlety, so I was thinking that the military observer, who would be a general, would be a misogynistic ass who didn't care about the lives of those under his command very much.

Part of this would be shown with the way teams were assembled, any team he had a say in would be all male, or contain at most one female he regarded as eye candy.  Any team assembled by either of the two protagonists would be about 50-50 male female.

I tried to think of another marine combination as absurd as sharktopus (shark octopus combination, if you don't know) and wasn't really getting anywhere so I went with creepy electric mermaids instead.  "Mershock" is a suitably absurd name, and I figure that they'd have the back half of an electric eel and the front half be humanoid.  Not human, but humanish enough to have arms and hands.  The thing would have uniform skin throughout (electric eel colored) and be hairless.  I think that to carry on with the transgenic animal idea (that is, not human-animal) it might be referred to as a combination of an electric eel and genetically enhanced baboons (this would be a Primal Force reference, which no one would get*).

The mershock monster would get its own movie, but I'm thinking that that would be a prequel, with the initial movie in the series being the vs. movie that would contain references here and there to "the first time"

Ok, so, movie 1:

Mershock vs. Sharktopus - We start with the beginning described above team sharktopus refuses to take stupid risk, team sharktopus is shut down.

There would be a scene that shows that team leader (who would have to be male since misogynistic general wouldn't have worked with a female team leader in the first place) has an affectionate relationship with the monster, which he calls Four Eyes.  (If you've got a shark's head at one end, and tentacles of an octopus at the other, then you've essentially got two front ends, one would assume that there's a beak at the center of those tentacles, so why not an extra pair of eyes to go with them so it can see what it's eating from the octopus end.)

There would also be a scene, probably either a member of team sharktopus taking the leader aside to try to convince him to give in to the general, or talking to him while the project is being shut down, that revealed that, like a student trying to make their project work for multiple classes, they'd sunken everything into the sharktopus, not just transgenic manipulation and animal training and whatnot, but also regeneration, and gentic storage of memory, and enhanced intelligence, and whatnot.  Throw in the kitchen sink.

Team leader would explain that his concern wasn't losing control of the creature, they've tried to raise it to not be evil, but losing communications with it.  If it wandered around it might investigate people, they might respond with force, and if it got the impression that people were the enemy that would be bad.

Anyway, this would be done in a few short scenes.

Then we have the same general overseeing a similar part of team mershock's work, they do what he asks, control is lost, mershock is evil, it escapes.

Enter protagonist 2.  She's an investigator (possibly military, possibly civilian, definitely government) who is trying to figure out exactly what's going on while General is being unhelpful.  Her investigation turns up a memo written by team sharktopus lead which, while profanity laden, tells her that the General did the exact same stupid thing previously.

She's the one who brings in team sharktopus lead, in the course of which she discovers that he still has Four Eyes (he lives by the sea.)

In some situations she'd be in charge (anything involving investigation), in some situations he'd be in charge (anything involving dealing with the mershock hunt), and they'd have a clear understanding of the boundaries of jurisdiction and not fight over it.

In the end the communication with the sharktopus would be lost (shorted out by evil mermaid), evil mermaid would attack the military's base of operations for this project in what would be an homage to Deep Blue Sea with a falling apart facility.  The sharktopus, without any communication would track down team sharktopus lead and save him from the mershock, the fight would be taken outside, and at that point the general would activate a failsafe device.

Failsafe not previously activated because:
a) Wanted to take the creature alive
b) Long range communication with failsafe device was damaged when control mechanisms were
c) It was a bomb, so in addition to not being able to be used at long range, it couldn't be used at close range either, it needed to be used in a sweet spot in the middle.

The failsafe kills the mershock but also appears to kill the sharktopus (cuts it right in half.)

And I've skipped the whole thing where the general assembles his own team.  The movie would have a contrast between the overly risk taking general's team (high fatality rate, including the team lead who was the survivor from previous incident) and team sharktopus that values the lives of it's members enough to not lose so much as one.

Movie ends with team sharktopus lead making up some BS about programing in a cellular killswitch to remove all evidence as an explanation for why the sharktopus body was never found when really he has no idea.

Then the body shows up at his home, each of the pieces (some of them quite small) regenerating into a new sharktopus.

The investigation side would have several victories, but general himself gets away with it as bringing him down would be a larger arc throughout the movies.

-

I'm not sure whether to go prequel or sequel here as I've thought up two of both.  The prequels would each be one creature movies, the sequels would each be one speices movies with lots of individuals.

None of them have that much thought put into them:

Sharktopus Prequel - The temptation to name it "Free Sharktopus" (after Free Willy) is strong.  Though technically it should be "Free Four Eyes" as the other movie wasn't called "Free Orca".  It wouldn't actually be a creature movie, it would be a heist/prison break movie.  It would be the story of how the sharktopus ended up living in the ocean, watched over by team sharktopus lead.

Mershock - The beginning of this creature's story.  It would be all about trying to stop it from getting out after its creators realized that somehow their screwing around had left it capable of parthenogenesis and given that electric eels can hatch as many as 3,000 young from one nest it's critical the creature doesn't go to nest.  The secondary antagonist, after the creature itself, would be someone more concerned with the project than the people, and eventually escaping unharmed with a genetic sample of the creature (while the movie's protagonists escape in a different direction after killing the thing) he'd be the survivor who ended up the general's team leader in the vs. movie.

Sequels:

Mershocks, or Mershock Swarm, or something like that - The creature from the vs. movie did lay eggs, many of which have hatched.  Since they don't know that the sharktopus survived, after a fashion, when team sharktopus lead is called in (which takes him away from overseeing his school of ... sharktopi?  technically that's an incorrect hypercorrection but it seems nicer sounding than sharktopodes) it is for research and analysis.  Investigator leads team sharktopus combined with her own team, and all are eventually forced to work with general and his forces because the problem is just that big.

Battle of the Sharktopi - Investigator's work on bringing down the general is going well enough that he's trying to cover his tracks, which means exterminating all of his transgenic projects to eliminate physical evidence.  At some point, probably during the previous movie, he got wind of the fact that the Sharktopus didn't actually die when he thought it did.

So naturally he comes to destroy the Sharktopus school.  Team sharktopus, with all the help they can get from team investigator, and the sharktopus school itself, fight off the attempted extermination.

In the end the school is saved, but the general escapes the fight.  He is instead brought down in court as a result of the the diligent work of the investigator.  Also brought to justice are those who in previous movies tried to push the matter under the rug rather than bring the general to justice when presented with evidence of his misdeeds.

-

* Seriously, even Amazon has never heard of the movie.  Imdb has, but that's not saying much.

-

[Movie Index]