Mako - Lo squalo della morte

I just purchased a DVD copy of this film, having subsisted on an ancient VHS tape for a few years. Alas, the DVD appears to have been mastered from either very poor stock, or from a VHS tape. The opening sequence is almost unwatchable. Even the credits appear blurry. The picture is dark and seems out of focus. I don't remember it being this way when I saw it in the theaters. Then again, I was six, so what did I know? I still like the psychic/psychotic connection Jaeckel has with the sharks, although I could definitely lose the hokey "shark medallion" sequence, which accomplished nothing. I've ordered a new DVD edition put out by a different company. Both versions sell very cheaply on Ebay. We'll see how it goes.

This film starts off by thanking the underwater directorial team for risking their lives for the making of it. I sincerely hope that this is just some sort of ploy and not actually the case, as Mako: The Jaws of Death is definitely not a film that anyone should even consider risking their life over. In 1975, Steven Spielberg released what is probably the great shark movie of all time with Jaws, but he really has a lot to answer for as that film inspired a whole host of awful (mostly Italian) rip-offs. I've only seen a handful of Jaws rip-offs, but even among the few that I've seen – Mako: The Jaws of Death surely ranks right down near the bottom, and that's actually a shame because it has a fairly decent plot idea going for it. Basically, we focus on a man with a bond for sharks. He keeps a few as 'friends' but attracts interest from local entities - including a scientist and a nightclub. He ends up loaning out some of his sharks, but is not impressed with their treatment and so decides to take his revenge...

The film does manage a true seventies exploitation style and while the film obviously shot on a very low budget, it still manages to be fairly good in that respect. The problem really is with the way that the plot is developed as it doesn't fulfil its potential and none of the characters are interesting enough to really care about, and that unfortunately includes the lead who really should have been a lot better considering his strange interest in sharks. There are a couple of familiar faces in the cast list - most notably Richard Jaeckel and Harold Sakata, who is credited in this film as Harold "Oddjob" Sakata. Unfortunately (saying that a lot in this review...), considering that the film is about sharks, sharks actually don't feature all that often and when they do it's a bit of a let-down. The film also lacks a lot of humour, and while it's clear that the filmmakers were not making a serious horror film to the audience; apparently they themselves were oblivious that fact! Overall, Mako: The Jaws of Death is a silly and tepid film and should not really be viewed by anyone!

The story is about a guy who received a shark amulet from an old man from Mindanao, Philippines in w/c later he's protecting all of his friends ( the sharks ) and he afters those people who hunts or use sharks for business. Then later, he feels tired, killed those shark hunters and users, when he drops the amulet, his friends ( sharks ) killed him. Very very basic yet enjoyable enough, easy to understand film in w/c the focus is a semi-revenge, semi-friend loving revenge films, an average one, but worth the watch. Recommended for peeps who likes shark movies and underwater and fishing lovers too. The amulet makes it a semi-fantasy film.

Someone already pointed out that MAKO: THE JAWS OF DEATH is a hybrid of JAWS and a cult classic about a young man with a twisted connection to rats, WILLARD. But this film's director William Grefé's STANLEY, about a slightly older fella hooked on snakes, already borrowed from the WILLARD template, making JAWS OF DEATH a clone of a clone of a clone...

As Richard Jaekel, no stranger to creepy roles despite or even accentuated by his blond-haired, man-next-door look, goes back and forth from the seaside town to the sea itself, where the opening credits of a diver swimming smoothly beside a killer shark proves the introductory scrawl, about how the underwater crew risked their lives in making this motion picture, wasn't just for show: the first two minutes alone defines exploitation cinema at its finest, and riskiest...

But for the fictional story, time moves rather slow like in these kind of shoddy, super low budget films, especially conversations between Jaekel and the sexy tavern-swimming dame he saves from being raped by two town bullies...

Seedy shark-hunters played by cult actors Harold 'Odd Job' Sakata ala GOLDFINGER and John Davis Chandler, who looks like Jaekel's brother from another father... Peter Lorre. And Jennifer Bishop's Karen isn't very wise when Jaekel shows-off two pet sharks he feeds from an estuary below his island shack's floorboard. She actually calls him crazy, right then and there. No other ingenue in a killer fish flick has ever asked for it so much... but that's only the beginning of her extremely predictable/inevitable fate...

Meanwhile, her boss and boyfriend, and the film's primary exploiter, Buffy Dee as Barney, is the real target: he owns the club where both the girl and Jaekel's trained shark will swim behind glass for the patrons (throwing in a little KING KONG and MIGHTY JOE YOUNG influence)...

Going back to WILLARD, Barney's the Ernest Borgnine character here (who played Bruce Davison's bitter boss), only Jaekel works for no one but himself. And again like STANLEY, practically note-for-note, the girl erotically "dances" with the main character's beloved pet... that he unwittingly sold for that reason, while not realizing the otherwise docile predator would be unfairly harmed: plus there's a trusted doctor that winds up a backstabber, and he also doesn't live very long...

But the best, most original scene occurs in the beginning where a fishing charter boat thinks they caught a prized Mako, and in fact, for a few minutes, they have: until ascending angel Jaekel moves in wielding severe yet entertaining ultra-violence... but perhaps too soon...

More similar creative body count moments distributed evenly throughout would've made this a lot more fun for the drive-in audience it seems intentionally made for/catered to. Instead there's a lot of waiting between preachy talk about protecting sharks from evil humans...

It's always more fun when the psychotic lead isn't so idealistic and self-righteous wherein, like SILENT RUNNING, he kills for supposedly forgivable reasons. But for shark cinema enthusiasts, MAKO, definitely more well filmed than well put-together, is something to admire, at least once.

This movie is about a guy whose best friends are sharks.

He talks to them and gets revenge if anybody hurts them. A science lab does something awful to his sharks and they pay the price. The music score for this movie is quite good and it sets the mood. Also the only thing this movie has in common with Jaws is that it has sharks in it, the plot is totally different. It also has some amusing parts in it too. All in all a fun, amusing shark movie. I give Mako: The Jaws of Death **1/2 out of ****