La mort au large

I had an opportunity to view this film on Japanese laser disc. The film's history is more interesting than the movie itself. Released in the U.S. under the title, "Great White," in 1982, the movie went as quckly as it had come into theatres at the time due to Steven Spielberg and Universal Studios having the film barred from distribution due to the blaring similarities to JAWS and JAWS 2. The company that distributed the film in the US went bankrupt and the producer disappeared.

Getting to the film itself, it has always had a mystique being banned in the US and not seeing video release. Released in other countries as "The Last Shark" or "The Last Jaws" the film is not completely lost. Having wondered whatever happened to this movie and why there wasn't a video release ever, I was surprised that "Great White" was available abroad under different titles. Having seen the film, I have to say that it wasn't anything special at all. The film is Italian with some of the actors clearly dubbed and a shark that could be a giant pool toy. The stock footage of real sharks sometimes helps but there is one where the silhouette is of a nurse shark and not a great white.

The late James Franciscus and Vic Morrow do as much as they can with their roles and do bring something to a film with no shortage of bad lines and wooden acting co-stars. But there's no sense of humor or interesting characters which helped "Piranha" overcome its extremely low budget special effects. There are a lot of slow scenes and the film is clearly not realistic such as the Mayor fishing for the shark with a side of beef dangling from a helicopter or the Shark shooter using a small rifle from a pier. Also, when one of the victims disappears while windsurfing, his friends go on a boat to look for him rather than calling the coast guard or police. The film fails by going for a quick scare and not building up the suspense to a crescendo that Speilberg did.

This film continues to be a curiosity due it's lack of availability here otherwise it would have become forgotten if no one had said anything collecting dust in a video store somewhere.

A quaint little beach town is terrorised by a bloodthirsty great white shark.

Universal Pictures' Jaws law suit aside, the film became the 72nd highest-grossing film in Italy 1980-1981. Enzo G. Castellari's offering suffers from the usual Italian ripoff trappings poor editing and ill-fitting music. Sadly the cut away stock footage of sharks really spoils an already chummy film. That said, it has some redeeming features including some of the shark special effects and James Franciscus performance.

The Last Shark otherwise known as Great White was quite a controversial movie around the time of it's release.

Considered a Jaws (1975) ripoff and even released as a faux Jaws sequel in Japan (Complete with Jaws in the title) a lawsuit unsurprisingly hindered it.

Ranked in many worst movies ever made lists I expected something a lot worse than this. In fact truth be told it looks about on par with Jaws itself and almost managed to spawn a sequel.

Telling the story of a coastal resort that comes under attack from a great white shark during a wind surfing contest it's pretty generic stuff but not all that awful.

The effects are considerably better than I expected, the performances are okay and if it weren't for the fact it was so unoriginal it might be considered a passable film.

In a world awash with terrible shark movies, this isn't actually one of them.

The Good:

SFX are great for its time

The Bad:

No originality

Soundtrack keeps sounding like Dolly Parton is about to regale us with 9 to 5

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

The confederates were big wind surfing enthusiasts

By walk out of the hospital I'm pretty sure he meant that she'd hop

Helicopters can't land on water

When it was released, The Last Shark (aka Great White) got quickly pulled from theaters due to threats of a lawsuit from Universal Studios, producers of the Jaws movies. Having seen the film on DVD, I can see why. The writers of The Last Shark basically watched the first two Jaws movies and stole every good scene from them, even going so far as to clone characters.

All the main elements from Jaws are here. The gnarled seaman...check. The heroic everyman...check. The corrupt government official who tries to cover up the attacks...check. Even some of the attack scenes mimic specific scenes in Jaws I and II.

These things are made worse by the fact that the Italian studio behind this film had nowhere near Spielberg's budget. Consequently, we have an obviously fake shark model that appears every time the shark sticks it's head out of the water, which is quite often. The underwater shots are accomplished by a mixture of stock shark footage and very fake looking stop motion animation.

Making things even more ludicrous is that the shark appears to be intelligent, engaging in uncharacteristic shark behavior such as trying to trap people in caves with rocks and using ropes as tow lines. At times, it comes across as a comedy.

Obvious mannequins are propelled skyward for some unexplained (and unintentionally funny) reason, as a shark, or in some scenes, a dolphin, terrorizes a small coastal community, just like in that other shark movie. Intro scene has seemingly never-ending windsurfing footage culminating with the shark causing the guy and his board to explode out and fly up out of the water! The bite marks in what's left of the board look more like razor slashes, at angles which could not have possibly been made by a shark, as we go back to the "bite radius" bit from Jaws. And remember when the head in the boat scared Hooper (and us, the audience) in Jaws? There is even a rip off of that here, as we find an arm bitten off by the shark. And, aww, innit that cute, they even tied a pink balloon around the shark to track it. Are you kidding me? Is that the low rent substitute of Quint's yellow barrels, pink ballons?

There actually is a little bit of tension toward the end of this one, in between bouts of unintended comedy, and some of the modelwork is amusing, The shark looks okay at a distance or at high angles, but when we're shown the shark at closer angles and for longer amounts of time, we realise just how inferior to Jaws it really is.

Ron succumbs to a fate similar to Quint's, in Peter Benchley's original novel, but the film is too derivative and slowly paced to amount to much more than a third-rate ripoff. Such a close ripoff, in fact, that Steven Spielberg and co. took legal action against the makers of this one, and had the movie effectively banned.