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.
