Lamar Sanders

Lamar Sanders is an ex-Navy Paleontologist Science professor and a main character in the 2009 Asylum film Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus. He is portrayed by Sean Lawlor.

Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009)
As a young man, Lamar was kicked out of the Navy for crashing a submarine to avoid hitting a pod of dolphins, and he later took up a teaching position at a University. Five years after they had last seen one another, Lamar was contacted by his favorite student Emma MacNeil, who had come across a peculiar specimen. He took her home, and after laboring over the piece, Lamar determined it was the tooth of a Megalodon. Emma was skeptical, but Lamar stood by his decision, citing recent unexplained nautical disasters, and centuries of sea-monster sightings including one of his own, and the fact that Megalodons fed on large sea creatures like whales. He then received a call from Dr. Seiji Shimada whom they met at the San Francisco Airport. Shimada sought their help in identifying the creature attacking Japan, and just after they realized there had to have been more than one creature, Emma relieved a package with footage from a minisub voyage she had taken near Alaska showing A Megalodon and Giant Octopus emerging from the ice. The next morning, Lamar's home was invaded by the military, and the three were taken to the Treasure Island U.S. Naval command station, where they informed the military that there were two monsters, an octopus in addition to the shark. Seiji and Emma then made it clear that the beasts were to be captured and not killed. Lamar and Seiji had already determined that their ideal capture points were the shelves of Tokyo Bay and San Francisco Bay. After nights of fruitless work on trying to design a lure for the monsters, Seiji and Emma decided to use pheromones to get the beasts to their respective bays.

With the shark fast approaching, Emma and Lamar entered the Aquanaut 3 to manually position the final canister of pheromones. However, the manipulator arm froze, and Emma was forced to maneuver the ship to ram the canister out of the arm. The arm broke off, and the two quickly retreated. On learning that the Japanese were also unsuccessful, the military proposed using nuclear weapons, which would be devastating to the ecosystem. Emma, however got the idea that the only way to win was to get the monsters to kill each other. They reused the pheromone tactic, as it had worked perfectly before. She knew that they would fight one another, as they had ignored their survival instincts in the ice age to fight one another. They then dragged their pheromone lures out to sea. After the military sent a fighter jet to get pictures of the Octopus, it was swatted out of the sky despite Lamar's demands to get the plane out of its reach.

With the shark fast approaching, Emma and Lamar entered the Aquanaut 3 to manually position the final canister of pheromones. However, the manipulator arm froze, and Emma was forced to maneuver the ship to ram the canister out of the arm. The arm broke off, and the two quickly retreated. On learning that the Japanese were also unsuccessful, the military proposed using nuclear weapons, which would be devastating to the ecosystem. Amid nightmares of global destruction, Emma decided that the only way to win was to get the monsters to kill each other. They reused the pheromone tactic, as it had worked perfectly before. She knew that they would fight one another, as they had ignored their survival instincts in the ice age to fight one another. After receiving a distress call from a Russian tanker, they were attacked by Mega Shark. With no other hope of escape, Lamar guided them through an ice trench in which, after a mutinous navigator refused to continue, Emma knocked him out and Lamar assumed full control. However, just as they escaped the trench, and the Shark was about to attack, the Octopus grabbed its tail, and they began to fight. They surfaced the submarine to escape, and emerged where she had taken the Aquanaut to watch the whales. The shark then attacked, and Emma, Lamar and a military commander abandon ship in the Aquanaut just before the Shark tore the main submarine in two. Shortly before being attacked, the Japanese Lead Sub Typhoon arrived to fire on the shark before being attacked by the octopus. The beasts began to fight and Emma went down to search for Seiji and the Typhoon with Lamar's full support, and the Typhoon quickly found them as the wounded beasts sank.

Afterward, Lamar approached Seiji and Emma on the beach with infrared images of a new unidentified creature in the North Sea, and they all left to investigate it.