STILLNESS IN THE WATER

SHARKS’LL EAT ANYTHING

 

THE CAR (1977)

It sounds a little funny to call The Car, about a black you-know-what terrorizing citizens within a dusty, barren, sandy landscape, a rip-off of JAWS, but...that's exactly what it is. Adding to the irony, in that everything about The Car is as opposite to JAWS as you can get, is that Spielberg's previous film to JAWS was Duel, about an ominous black truck terrorizing one particular unfortunate man across a dusty, barren, sandy landscape. Much in the same way the shark of JAWS cruised the waters of Amity Island, the black demonized Lincoln of The Car cruises the sandy roads of a Santa Fe-ish town - both relentlessly looking for victims, both of a scope never before seen, and both announcing their presences with a fin and a horn, respectively. And meanwhile, two sheriffs dealing with their own shortcomings (a fear of the water and a desire to live up to a law-enforcement father) find themselves contending with the monstrous force that's come to plague their homes.

But where JAWS was a high concept, philosophical audience favorite, The Car is just dumb, lacking emotion, philosophy, or anything toward which other films wishing to make more than a visceral impact strive.

But, that's okay.

There's an undeniable enjoyment that derives from watching The Car. That it never reveals who or what it is behind the wheel adds to that enjoyment, leaving that bit of mystery to embolden the idea that whatever's driving the car is something unnatural and evil. And once the film achieves its highest Blues Brothers level of absurdity by having the titular force impossibly roll, sideways, over the two patrol cruisers pursuing it, clearly destroying itself in the process only to touch back down on the ground without a mark in the paint or some soot on the previously blazing grill, well, by now you're either fully on board with The Car or not.

The Car is dumb but absolutely entertaining. A breezy 90 mins filled with car-nage (get it?), half-baked ideas, and moments of nonsense even sillier than the nonsense surrounding it (how's a car drive itself into a garage and then lock itself in?), it's a clever-enough spin on the killer-car sub-genre and an unlikely but wholly watchable JAWS rip-off. Though The Car's originality is running low on gas, it's an offbeat title you shouldn't put in your rear-view, and other metaphors about cars.

(P.S. A very, very belated sequel was recently released direct-to-video called The Car: Road to Revenge. It's one of the worst things you could ever see, but it's hilariously incompetent.)

A WHOLE DIFFERENT ANIMAL: ‘ORCA’ (1977)

By now, JAWS is a Hollywood institution. It not only birthed the summer blockbuster, but, like any popular new idea, it inspired countless knockoffs – a trend that continues to this day. Putting aside the more infamous examples, like the Italian-lensed Cruel Jaws (yes, this is real) and Enzo G. Castellari’s The Last Shark aka Great White, both of which saw their U.S. releases halted by JAWS distributor Universal Studios due to obvious reasons, the “animals-run-amok” subgenre wasn’t actually confined just to sharks. Following the unparalleled success of JAWS, every kind of animal that could reasonably run amok ran amok, regardless if those animals had legs or not.

Even those animals (or insects) that weren’t obvious amok-runners still got their own one-word titles through which to generate “terror”: Grizzly, Frogs, Slugs, Bug, Ants, Gi-Ants, Squirm, etc.

Even automobiles got in on the action, like 1974’s Killdozer and 1977’s The Car.

It got pretty ridiculous.

Addressing the great white in the room, Orca, on its surface, could easily be written off as one of these JAWS bastards. It even takes the name of Quint’s doomed sea vessel for its title. Obviously, the similarities are profound. Sea-based killer animal? Check. Crusty, hard-drinking boat captain tasked with killing the beast? Check. A crew assembled with people of differing philosophies toward the animal and how it should be dealt with? Check. An entire town’s financial stability affected by the maniacal animal? Oh yes. And like JAWS, Orca also gets a huge boost from its musical score – Ennio Morricone’s absolute all-time best, in fact.

Long dismissed as just another JAWS clone, Orca is worthy of much more respectable appreciation – forty years after its release.

While out on a routine sharking expedition hoping to land a big payday for a local aquarium, Captain Nolan (Richard Harris) and the crew of his vessel, the Bumpo, get an up-close and personal encounter with an orca whale during a shark attack. Impressed with the size and savagery of the whale, Nolan switches targets, deciding that the capture of a male orca – alive – would fetch a much bigger payday. But after botching this capture and accidentally killing the targeted orca’s pregnant mate (which miscarries on the Bumpo in a devastating sequence), the orca becomes incensed, ramming the vessel and then stalking the murderous captain all the way back to shore – and beyond – intent on ruining his life by any means necessary. Even from the frigid ocean waters, the orca inexplicably begins to wear down Nolan in every feasible means – physically, mentally, financially, existentially, and philosophically. (If Hannibal Lecter were an animal, he would be an orca.) Soon, Captain Nolan is left with no choice but to take back to the sea and engage in a battle to the death with his massive opponent.

Yes, Orca follows a lot of the same familiar JAWS beats, and though it pales in comparison, Orca is much better than its reputation or immediate sketchy filmic colleagues would suggest. (The opening sequence, which sees the orca kill a great white shark in a violent battle, is a not-so-subtle dig at its legendary predecessor.) Based on the 1977 novel of the same name by Arthur Herzog, what sets Orca off from its unintended brethren is the amount of sincerity with which it was made, with much of the credit going to director Michael Anderson (Logan's Run) for maintaining a level of seriousness and weaving a palpable sense of regret throughout what would otherwise be your standard animal-revenge thriller. Orca is inherent with sadness and despair, from the quiet haunted life of Nolan to the vicious capture of the pregnant orca, right down to the icy finale which sees the crew being led to the unforgiving crushing ice caps and brutal cold of the Strait of Belle Isle. Not a single time during the film can the sun be glimpsed or does daylight look bright and warm. Colors are muted, and at dusk, barely present. Nolan and his crew live a shiftless life, existing only in those strange lands where their fishing work takes them. No one has any roots to speak of – the only relationships they have are with each other. All of this is purposeful; Orca isn’t out for the same kind of adventurous thrills as JAWS, nor is it only interested in cheap but entertaining exploitation thrills like Alligator. Though the furious orca kills quite a few people, it’s not done for titillation like the usual sharksploitation flick. As each character sleeps with the fishes, you feel conflicted, even if these characters have shown off their ignorance toward the dangers that their profession can have on the ecosystem. Like real people, they’re flawed but not villainous, and none of them are particularly heroic; in fact, Nolan only gets up the gumption to resolve the conflict he’s inadvertently created because the town where he‘s temporarily docked blackmails him into doing it – even refusing to sell gasoline to the crew attempting to retreat from their sins. (Heroism!)

Aiding Orca’s effectiveness is the slightly dangerous tone exhibited by ‘70s-era Italian thriller and horror films, which always had their own look and feel, and which were heightened in every sense – regardless of genre. Exploitation films were just a bit more exploitative. The infamous “cannibal horror” period was rife with filmmakers pushing boundaries – so much that murder charges were brought against Cannibal Holocaust director Ruggero Deodato in response to the too-convincing fates that befell that film’s characters. This sensibility would spawn the giallo sub-genre – one that gleefully focused on the exaggeration of sex and sensuality, fluid and poetic camera movement, and, most famously, very specifically choreographed and violent murder sequences. The presence on Orca of Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, a major figure during this time (and who remained so until his death; he’d go on to produce several films in the Hannibal Lecter franchise), and the largely Italian crew – from the script writers to the production and art designers – inadvertently rode that over-stylized subset of Italian filmmaking, which enhances Orca’s sense of danger and unease; it comes across as similarly loose-cannoned and willing to push the boundaries of good taste, even though, except for the upsetting whale capture scene in the first act, Orca is fairly restrained. (Though this is not at all applicable to Orca, Italian productions were also occasionally unkind to animals, which also enhances the unsettling usage of Orca’s special effects. More on that in a bit.)

Richard Harris’ Captain Nolan is a heavy figure. The fisherman lives a life of isolation, having seen his pregnant wife perish in a car accident caused by a drunk driver – one that’s already taken place before the opening credits, but which can be unnervingly glimpsed through quick flashbacks complemented by the unsettling shrill shriek of an orca. The film draws parallels both obvious (the tragic loss of a burgeoning family) and subtle (obsession leading to self-destruction) between Nolan and the orca that hunts him, and which he then begins to hunt. As life took away Nolan’s family, so Nolan took away that of the orca. They become one and the same — two lost souls navigating a cold and barren seascape; satisfying the avenging beasts within them is the only thing offering them forward momentum.

The death scenes, too, are executed differently. Unlike JAWS, where the shark attack scenes were suspensefully predicated by John Williams’ famous low-end piano and Spielberg’s paranoid shots of the water, the death scenes here are quick and brutal, and over before you realize they’ve happened. The orca lunges with a shriek, takes his target, and disappears beneath the depths. It’s not at all about suspense this time around; it’s much more focused on shock – how, at one moment, you can be sitting safely on the bow of a ship, and at the next, you’re immediately disappeared as if you never existed. Again, a film that clearly exists because of what’s come before is still making an effort to distance itself through different stylistic choices. Yes, both films feature an aquatic killer as the main threat, but each is going about it as differently as they can while remaining in the same genre and delivering, ultimately, what the audience expects.

For its time, the special effects are quite good. Granted, some of the visual tricks, like superimposing together scenes of orcas breaching the ocean’s surface, show their age, but the practical effects are extremely lifelike to the point where certain shots look downright disturbing. Charlotte Rampling sitting on the beach next to the corpse of the orca that Nolan kills during the opening moments and seeing it rock and sway in the coming and going ocean tide offers it a very sad reality. (Production on Orca was even momentarily shut down following outcry from animal rights groups after someone glimpsed a life-sized orca prop being trucked into the shooting location.) A brief shot of a pummeled great white shark floating lifelessly in bloody waters, too, looks alarmingly real. (It wasn’t; all underwater shark photography was captured by ocean conservationists Ron and Valerie Taylor, who famously obtained all the real shark footage used in JAWS.) Honestly, there are times when Orca’s best special effects even look better than some of the troublesome effects from JAWS – and for a film that would go on to inspire a multi-billion dollar franchise and a theme park ride (RIP), that’s not dismissible praise.

It’s fair to admit that Orca would not exist without JAWS, but it would also be unfair to disregard Orca as a lazy cash-grab. It has its own identity and purpose, and its own less traveled path for getting there – one might even argue that it has much more in common with Moby Dick than that aforementioned stillness in the water. Richard Harris once stated to have found the characters in its script far richer and more complicated than Brody, Hooper, and Quint, and that its label of being a mere JAWS rip-off was offensive. Charlotte Rampling, who works steadily to this day, continues to look back on the film with pride. Affirmations like these are important to preserving and fairly examining Orca’s legacy. This isn’t a case where actors, who go on to more prominent roles in wider reaching films, look back on their horror past with embarrassment and dismissal. A good film is a good film, regardless of its genre, unfair reputation, and especially regardless of its inspiration.

A STILLNESS

"Brody felt a shimmy of fear skitter up his back. He was a very poor swimmer, and the prospect of being on top of—let alone in—water above his head gave him what his mother used to call the wimwams: sweaty palms, a persistent need to swallow, and an ache in his stomach—essentially the sensation some people feel about flying. In Brody's dreams, deep water was populated by slimy, savage things that rose from below and shredded his flesh, by demons that cackled and moaned."

SHITTY FLICKS: JAWS: THE REVENGE

Shitty Flicks is an ongoing column that celebrates the most hilariously incompetent, amusingly pedestrian, and mind-bogglingly stupid movies ever made by people with a bit of money, some prior porn-directing experience, and no clue whatsoever. It is here you will find unrestrained joy in movies meant to terrify and thrill, but instead poke at your funny bone with their weird, mutant camp-girl penis.

WARNING: I tend to give away major plot points and twist endings in my reviews because, whatever. Shut up.

Pre-3D Dennis Quaid, the Jaws series was pretty respectable, and granted, while we're only talking two films here, Jaws 2 had a lot to live up to. Compared to how sequels usually go, Amity's second go-around with a killer shark is pretty good. But then that fateful day came when Jaws: The Revenge/Snooki was born. And they have been lowering the bar ever since.

Jaws: The Revenge begins in December in the small, sea-side town of Amity. Choirs rehearse, people merrily shop, and a shark uncharacteristically swims in the freezing cold Amity waters, hanging out near the old piece of drift wood it's put in place to lure out the youngest son of his arch nemesis, Chief Brody (Roy Scheider, who opted not to return in any further Jaws films following Jaws 2, yet would agree to star in even worse direct-to-video sequels to fucking Dracula 2000—but I’m not bitter. RIP, by the way).

Ellen Brody, widow of Martin, fries a disturbing looking fish for dinner as her youngest son, Sean, the new Chief Brody of Amity, hangs out and stares at his mother with an unintentional, yet undeniable, look of lust. They receive a call from Mike, the eldest Brody son (cult hero Lance Guest) who is on a cushy grant assignment in the Bahamas. They make witty phone banter, reminding us that this is what real families do, and that what we’re about to experience—a shark methodically stalking members of a specific bloodline—is a problem real families face every day.

"Yeah, sure, I'll do 'Revenge of Jaws.' Just let me beat
my pride with a log and I'll be right there." - Roy Scheider

Later, Sean, having Christmas shopped while on duty, is on his way out the police station door to spend the holidays with his family when Polly, his old hen secretary, informs him that some piece of drift wood is caught under a buoy and needs to be towed away, lest it cause some sort of accident from all that late night, bitter-as-cold Christmas traffic. Brody relents, climbing aboard his boat after reminding various passersby that he shares a connection with them—that he is a part of their lives and history, as they are a part of his.

And then the shark eats both of his arms.

Seriously? A man who has had two previous shark encounters feels his best course of action, after having both arms ripped off by a shark that is intent on killing him, is to lean his whole fucking body over the side of his boat as he shouts to the nearby shore for help?

Of course, no one hears him, and he is eaten about as quickly as the realization that set in for people who paid to see this movie that they were watching a train wreck.

Ellen cries.

Mike and his family fly home to Amity for the funeral, where Mike sees that Ellen is going batty, since she's convinced the shark Martin Brody killed at the end of the first film 15 years prior is back to kill off the family (which is true...?). Ellen claims that Chief Brody was killed by the shark, to which Mike retorts it was a heart attack. “It was the fear,” Ellen turds. “The fear of it killed him!”

Ellen cries.

Mike convinces her to come to the Bahamas with him for a vacation away from all the drama. Ellen agrees. They board the ferry to the mainland to begin their journey to a warmer climate, and hopefully, happier times.

Ellen cries.

On their flight to the Bahamas, we are introduced to one of the least-imaginatively named characters in cinema history: Hoagie, played by Michael Caine, who famously could not accept his Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters in person because he was off filming this monstrosity. The genesis of his character name came from the screenwriter's realization that he could no longer coast on the already-established series' characters and would have to come up with his first original name. And so he sat back in his chair, stared at his store-bought dinner, and said, “What the fuck should I name him?”

Michael Caine would eventually go on record with his thoughts on the movie with one of the most fantastic things anyone has ever said about their own work: "I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."

(penis joke)

The family arrives at Mike’s home and Ellen freaks out almost immediately, as Mike’s young daughter, Thea, plays on a rope swing out on the water. Ellen then feels like a burden and probably cries.

Later, Mike is out on the water doing his bullshit experiments on conch shells, and we meet Jake, played by Mario Van Peebles, whose mock Bahamian accent offends both the ears and true natives.

Meanwhile, Ellen swims out in the middle of the ocean when she suddenly realizes this is an awful idea and gets the spooks. She begins to swim to shore when she is savagely attacked by a shark and is killed. Her blood mingles with that of the warm, island waters the end.

Oh, wait, I’m sorry. That was just a dream sequence. God, I’m really sorry—I was completely fooled there for a second. I really thought that our lead character would completely break character, spend time in a place that she's deathly afraid of, and then die halfway through her own film. 

Turns out there’s about another hour of this to get through. My bad.

Out during a routine conch shell tagging, which is probably the least interesting thing marine biologists could ever desire to do, the shark makes its presence known by sidling on up next to Jake as he farts around in his tiny little whatever-the-fuck mobile at the bottom of the ocean.

“There’s a big fish down here, mon,” Jake gurgles into the walkie talkie.

Mike, up on the surface on their boat, smiles, maybe remembering his dismembered dead brother.

“Oh yeah? How big?”

Cue the shark suddenly popping out of the water and chewing dumbly on the side of the boat for a moment before giving up and sinking below the water.

(stuffy British voice) "Notice how the shark propels itself
upward on its haunches to investigate the black man with the
odd hair. The shark manages to hold its whole body out of the
water using a method we call magic."

Jake escapes back to the surface since the shark couldn’t give less of a shit about him, and he has a joygasm in his shorts, enthusiastically making very preliminary plans on how to track the shark. Mike forlornly sits on the side of the boat, remembering that one time his family was destroyed by a very similar shark. Jake realizes he’s being a dick and unbelievably insensitive and the two wrestle.

Later, Jake attaches a heartbeat tracking device to the shark and hooks it up to a monitor, which will alert them if the shark is ever within close proximity. It should be noted that Jake is capable of creating inventive machines to help aid in the tracking of a great white shark, something no one had ever done up to that point, yet devotes his studies to finding out how conch shells fuck and move.

Ellen and Hoagie grow closer and closer, almost on the verge of having old sex, when something less disturbing happens: The shark attacks Thea while she is out on the water and eats the woman sitting right behind her.

Ellen, sick of this shit, takes Mike’s boat and heads out to sea, her eyes narrowed, her old, gnarled hands grasping the wheel, her dry skin stretched over her forehead like a child’s mask. What her plan is remains unknown by the audience and probably her. All we know is she’s pissed (because the music says we have to think that).

Mike returns home, sees his daughter in a semi-comatose state, and then leaves to chase down his mother with the help of Jake, who apparently sits the fuck home and does nothing as the whole island is besot with shark-inflicted trauma.

On their way to find another boat, they run into Hoagie, and the three hop into his plane to find Ellen, who has made incredible, space travel-like time to get so far out into the middle of nowhere. The plane discovers her as she is in the throes of her genius plan: to stand at the bow and sit there like old, white shit as the shark pops up out of the water to eat her flaccid body. Luckily, Hoagie is an ace pilot, and he flies so low that it knocks her out of her stupid ‘whoa-as-me’ trance, saving her life and keeping her on the planet for at least 3-4 more years.

SHARK DANCE PARTY!!

Hoagie attempts a water landing, which is impossibly successful. Mike and Jake swim for the boat, and Hoagie, instead of getting his old ass in gear and swimming for the boat himself, opts to just stand on the wing of the plane and make old cockney jokes.

The shark then pops up and eats Hoagie. How ironic.

Mike and Jake reach the boat and everyone hugs.

Ellen cries.

Then Hoagie pops up to alleviate the high dramatic tension this movie thinks it’s creating, fresh out of the water, yet, completely dry. Hoagie makes about five unfunny jokes in a row before they figure out they should probably concoct a way not to die. Jake turns a flashlight into something that sends out electronic pulses to the tracking device attached to the shark and can fuck with the shark’s sonar, thus confusing it so they can….do something that remains unknown. If anyone has a plan to follow up the pulse thing, nobody’s talking.

Jake steps out on the ledge of the bow to shoot electronic pulses at the shark. The shark responds by shoving his head out of the water and screaming. Jake does this a bunch of times until the shark pops up out of the water right under him. Jake attempts to shove the whole flashlight gizmo into the shark’s mouth, which I guess is supposed to make it explode.

Somehow.

Well, Jake falls directly into the shark’s mouth because he is a dumb, dumb fuck.

Mike screams one of cinema's greatest slow-motion screams.

Ellen cries.

If you watch this scene barely carefully, you’ll see that the shark, with Jake firmly entrenched in its jaws, then lowers itself snout-first back into the water, which would indicate that this shark is completely out of the water for such a move to make any kind of physically realistic sense.

Note to filmmakers: sharks are not snakes. Also, they do not growl/scream.

"How do you do daht wit you body, mon?"

Mike makes his own flashlight gizmo and tries the same damn thing. The shark again screams like a dinosaur each time it receives a shock. Ellen steers the boat, and as she does so, inexplicably has flashbacks to Martin Brody’s bad-ass defeat of the shark in the first film, even though she wasn't actually there to see it. As Mike sends out pulses, Hoagie stares with his thumb up his ass and continues to make supremely inappropriate jokes, and Ellen steers the boat, and:

ENDING # 1

One last pulse from the flashlight pisses off and disorients the shark so much that it LITERALLY, and impossibly, stands completely perpendicular out of the water so that Ellen can steer the boat's broken bowspirit directly into it, stabbing it. The shark wiggles its head around as blood spews everywhere, and the boat is ripped apart by the flailing.

ENDING # 2

One last pulse causes the shark to literally EXPLODE, shooting pieces of shark gore everywhere. The force of the shark exploding also causes the entire boat to explode, and our cast is thrown into the “ocean,” and if you look carefully, you can see water clearly lapping up against the matte painting in the background. And despite the fact that the shark exploded to pieces, we see it sink slowly to the bottom of the ocean, letting its blood fill the screen until all we can see is red—a frankly beautiful shot in an otherwise shitty movie. And do you know why? Because it’s stolen, frame-for-frame, directly from the first Jaws.

The three survivors meet up in the water to talk about stuff going on in their lives when suddenly Jake, offensively alive, floats up to them and says hello. This is what we call an “homage.” This scene is an “homage” to the original Jaws, where Richard Dreyfuss suddenly shows up at the end after being gone for most of the final act, even though the audience thought he was dead. It was a little nudge at the audience,  the original filmmakers saying, “See? We had you! We had you so good you forgot about Richard Dreyfuss!” However, don’t be fooled. Jaws is a fantastic film - a true display of bravura filmmaking in the face of high on-set tensions and malfunctioning special effects.

Jaws: The Revenge isn’t.

Jaws: The Revenge shows a grown man being savagely chewed and eaten by a shark, and then pulled under water for several bloody minutes, but then has that man come back anyway so these very lame filmmakers can say, “See? We fooled you. You all thought Jake was dead because his chest was ripped apart and he was drowned.”

Anyway, why the two endings? It would seem Ending # 1 was the re-shot ending, which I guess was less stupid than Ending # 2—you know, the one featuring the spontaneous explosion.

TRIVIA!

The former president of Universal Studios, Sid Sheinberg, commissioned this film to be made as a birthday present to his wife. That wife? Lorraine Gary. And she reacted to the prospect of such an audacious birthday gift the same way audiences did after they saw this film so many moons ago.

She cried.

What I Learned from Jaws: The Revenge:

• Sharks growl.
• Sharks are capable of setting up elaborate traps to snare their victims.
• Sharks hold grudges against people.
• Sharks will avenge other sharks, even though they also eat each other.
• People are named Hoagie.
• Michael Caine will literally do anything for money.

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SHITTY FLICKS: JAWS 5: CRUEL JAWS

Shitty Flicks is an ongoing column that celebrates the most hilariously incompetent, amusingly pedestrian, and mind-bogglingly stupid movies ever made by people with a bit of money, some prior porn-directing experience, and no clue whatsoever. It is here you will find unrestrained joy in movies meant to terrify and thrill, but instead poke at your funny bone with their weird, mutant camp-girl penis.

WARNING: I tend to give away major plot points and twist endings in my reviews because, whatever. Shut up.

Long ago, when the moon was high and the water was rising, a man named Bruno Mattei (R.I.P.) was born. His destiny for filmmaking greatness was carved in stone, but that stone, it turns out, wasn't stone at all - it was stinky, rotting cheese; and soon, Bruno began making the shittiest films you could ever imagine. Titles such as S.S. Extermination Love Camp, Porno Exotic Love, Porno Holocaust and Terminator II (but amazingly enough, not the Terminator II) were blazoned upon movie marquees. His films were hailed as exploitation trash, but gradually they developed their own cult following, as will anything incredibly stupid.

Bruno's masterpiece, Cruel Jaws, is something of a legend. Its title is whispered about on websites and blogs. Anyone who likes shark movies, or bad Italian cinema, has heard of its existence. And Cruel Jaws is unique, to be sure; not because of its plot, or of Bruno's presence, but because the film utilizes blatantly stolen footage from many different shark movies (the entire Jaws series, as well as The Last Shark and Deep Blood). The movie itself is a bold-faced rip-off of the original Jaws, and was even released as Jaws 5 in some foreign territories.

There are some out there who can look at a movie like Shark Attack or Deep Blue Sea and exclaim, "Pfft...Jaws rip-off!" simply because the movie is about sharks. Cruel Jaws is something much more than a rip-off, for it's a literal unauthorized remake of the first Jaws. Same lines of dialogue are spoken by their respective “characters,” only these new characters aren’t nearly as cool as the previous. Instead of Roy Scheider, we get a sweaty sheriff who plays second banana to the Richard Dreyfuss replacement, Wiener Man. And instead of the immeasurably cool and legendary Robert Shaw, we get a freakish-looking doppelganger of Hulk Hogan. Cruel Jaws also steals the disbelieving town mayor archetype. Peter Benchley even receives credit as a writer.

Drooping one step lower than you typical, half-assed shark film, the movie contains a mixture of stock footage, “original” footage, and the previously mentioned outright-stolen footage. Because this footage is so haphazardly smashed together, there is even a scene in which terrified onlookers point at a shark and scream during the day, and then we get a good look at the shark they are screaming at; a shark that's clearly swimming around in the dark ocean waters...at night.

Dag always laughs as he watches his crippled daughter
attempt to use the Slip-N-Slide.

The movie begins and we meet our the main protagonist, Dag, as he cavorts around in an obnoxious neon green hat and plays with dolphins at the aquarium he owns. Then we meet Dag's daughter, Gimp, who is paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. However, said paralysis does not prevent said girl from kicking her obviously functional legs out from under her when she swims.

Wiener Man, along with his frumpy girlfriend, show up to celebrate the town's upcoming regatta. The couple bears some untold relationship to Gimp, but this relationship is left to wallow in its own obscurity.

It's pretty much right around here, I guess at the eight-minute mark, that the movie begins to blatantly steal from Jaws, as Wiener Man describes spending "18 months at sea on a floating asylum for oceanic research." This same character will later go on to explain that, "All sharks do are swim, eat, and make baby sharks...and that's all." Granted, the boy may be a geek, but he's not the Lord of the Geeks: Richard Dreyfuss, who originally delivered this dialogue exactly 20 years prior to this movie.

As the film continues, the stock and stolen footage continues to contradict itself, showing both tiger sharks and great whites, but hey, who's watching? You're not.

And just when you might notice such a glaring error as that, a man who seriously looks like the former dirty dancer himself, Patrick Swayzee (R.I.P.), shows up, playing the smarmy son of the smarmy mayor and dirtily dances around the beaches with his beach bunny.

Among other things "borrowed" from other films would be, oh, I guess the theme from Star Wars that is changed at the very last minute so as to sound different. I find it baffling that the filmmakers, who clearly have no problem stealing whole screenplay pages and footage from other movies would be remiss to steal the infamous Jaws theme as well. I also find it baffling that I am even watching this movie.

The nerdy couple goes to a disco dance club where they meet up with some equally nerdy friends. One of their friends, a stupid girl, exclaims, "I wanna dance!" as she is already dancing.

Thankfully, the titular shark of cruelty attacks and the town goes apeshit. As per Jaws, people go nuts trying to kill the shark to collect the handsome bounty.

Wiener Man tries in vain to tell the authorities what they are dealing with: "A sort of locomotive with a mouth full of butcher's knives." Shockingly, no one opts to listen to the wiener who spouts odd metaphors.

This event will, unfortunately, see the end of Patrick Swayzee and his battalion of cracker friends. The shark breaches, trying in vain to reach that hunk of meat that's nestled in the nether regions of the stock footage, and Patrick falls in the water.

As Patrick is gobbled up, his annoying girlfriend shrieks wildly and douses herself in gasoline in some half-assed attempt to burn the shark. Random boy figures this would be a perfect time to take aim with his trusty flare gun, and he fires at the shark (in order to edit in stolen footage of a boat explosion from Jaws 2 that this scene is depending on to conclude).

You wouldn't think it to look at her, but Marcy was
fucking hardcore during street fights.

Our idiotic trio has had enough of this sharkery, and the nerdy biologist and Dag decide it is time to go mano-a-squalo. As the two prepare for their battle on the dock, Gimp blatantly stands to hug her freak father before he sets off on a shark-hunting extravaganza of stolen footage and retardation.

Brutish men, on hire from the corrupt mayor, set out after the crew to silence them regarding some bullshit reason. But gosh, in all that open ocean, how will these men ever find them? Perhaps they could use that map that our heroes conveniently placed out in the open. You know, the map that depicts an area of charted ocean that is circled in fat red marker, with "IT'S HERE!" scrawled next to a fat red arrow confirming their destination.

And since we're now officially in a cartoon, I can't help but wonder when they're going to load up their ship with anvils.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Berger has a sudden attack of genius. He grabs a hunk of meat, a large hook, and hops in a helicopter to fly over the ocean, dangling said meat on said hook. He thinks this will work. We know it won't. You can pretty much guess what happens next.

Shark wailed in heartbreak as Helicopter,
who was biting back tears of his own, fled ashamedly.

Sheriff Berger shouts, "We're gonna need a bigger helicopter," gets pulled down into the water, and is instantly eaten. Then the shark lowers itself into the water and FARTS. (Granted, it was merely escaping air that had been caught in the head of the prop shark, but that's erroneous. It FARTED at me.)

Our idiotic trio sets some charges below in the sunken craft (kinda like exactly how Deep Blood ended) and causes the shark to explode… three different times in order to incorporate stolen footage from three different movies.

And at the very clipped ending of the third explosion, Mattei actually has the audacity to recreate the famous bone-to-spaceship shot from Kubrick's 2001, only this time, with a shark-exploding-multiple-times to jumping-dolphins shot.

I know what you’re thinking: you’re going to hop on Amazon to locate your own, personal copy of Cruel Jaws, perhaps one that comes with a digital copy that you could put on your iDag. But alas, the film is not available in the US, due to Universal Studios' immediate lawsuit filed against the movie's release back in '95. However, for the more savvy Googlers, there are copies of it floating around in cyberspace like a terrible shark prop, just waiting for you to Paypal your way into its heart.

In conclusion, when you're at the video store, staring at the case for Jaws, and wondering if you really want to watch it again for the 217th time, I recommend you go home, jump on eBay, and bid on a Region 0 DVD for Cruel Jaws. Then you can sit there and wait and re-bid and wait and re-bid and then get outbid by the big nerd who is willing to pay a lot of money for a stupid shark movie from Italy.

COME ON OUT INTO THE WATER

I'm pleased and happy to repeat the news that we have, in fact, caught and killed a large predator that supposedly injured some bathers. But, as you can see, it's a beautiful day, the beaches are open, and people are having a wonderful time.

Amity, as you know, means "friendship."

Turkey.

Czechoslovakia (ver 1).

Czechoslovakia (ver 2).

Thailand.

Poland.

Japan.

(Kidding - although this is a real movie.)

LIKE A DOLL'S EYES

Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, chief. It was comin' back, from the island of Tinian to Laytee, just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen footer. You know how you know that when you're in the water, chief? You tell by lookin' from the dorsal to the tail.

What we didn't know... was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. Huh huh. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, chief. The sharks come cruisin'. So we formed ourselves into tight groups. You know it's... kinda like ol' squares in battle like a, you see on a calendar, like the battle of Waterloo. And the idea was, the shark comes to the nearest man and that man, he'd start poundin' and hollerin' and screamin' and sometimes the shark would go away. Sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he's got...lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah then you hear that terrible high pitch screamin' and the ocean turns red and spite of all the poundin' and the hollerin' they all come in and rip you to pieces.

Y'know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men! I don't know how many sharks, maybe a thousand! I don't know how many men, they averaged six an hour.

On Thursday mornin' chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player, boson's mate. I thought he was asleep, reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up and down in the water, just like a kinda top. Up ended. Well... he'd been bitten in half below the waist.

Noon the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us, he swung in low and he saw us. He's a young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper, anyway he saw us and come in low. And three hours later a big fat PBY comes down and start to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened? Waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket again.

So, eleven hundred men went in the water, three hundred and sixteen men come out.

The sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945.