La notte degli squali

I wanted this movie to be a "so bad it's good" gem very much. The cover looked like a classic 80s cheese-fest that would fill me with much joy and laughter. The opening scene was promising. However, my initial expectations were eventually butchered and thrown into the water like fish bait.

The movie gave me little to no reason to invest in the characters. There's almost no backstory for anyone including the lead, David (Treat Williams). What little backstory you get isn't really explored or establishes solid character motivation. Even with the lack of character development, I was at least hoping for some charismatic acting or cheesy dialogue to keep me entertained. Unfortunately, there isn't much of it.

The soundtrack was laughably terrible. I'm sure they used the same track of suspense music for every "tense" moment in the movie whether it was a gun fight or a shark attack. It is super irritating after having heard it for the 100th time. It will forever be ingrained in my memory.

I wasn't expecting a stellar plot or anything but it was a complete mess. It's like the writer said, "I want to make Diamonds Are Forever," but the director said, "I want to make Jaws." So they compromised and combined them into one movie.

As bad as this movie was, there were a few moments that were enjoyable. Almost all of them involved the shark (or sharks? I'm not sure cause they seemed to use footage of multiple species like tigers, lemons, reefs and maybe bull sharks). The attacks were well shot and edited cutting between real and fake sharks. Not saying it was Jaws quality but decent enough for a movie like this.

In the end, there really isn't enough "so bad it's good" moments in this movie to recommend it. It's really boring for long stretches and the scenes with the shark are too few and far between to justify wasting 86 minutes of your life (it felt way longer than 86 minutes).

FUN FACT: Did you know tiger sharks can roar? I didn't until I watched this movie. Maybe a "nod" to a worse film, Jaws: The Revenge.

Extremely low-budget Italian-import-exploitation involving one of the most familiar plot-lines: a flaky sibling and their inevitable, semi-deserved death from being involved with the seedy crime world to begin with...

Leading to vengeful, tropical-shark-hunting older brother Treat Williams (with sidekick Antonio Fargas and priest Christopher Connelly), whose balmy paradise gets encroached by killers... either the dorsal-finned kind or those wearing cheap suits, providing danger from the blood-soaked ocean to a machine-gunned jungle...

Throwback to the previous decade's pulpy third-world body-count action programmers, combined with what, at the time, was technologically modern: the blackmailing brother had damning information not on the usual spy-genre microfilm, but something called a CD...

Making NIGHT OF THE SHARKS more a would-be thriller than what the adventurous title attempts in a rushed third act, and, with a techno track by iconic composer Stelvio Cipriani under a similar MIAMI VICE-influence of director Tonino Ricci, this SHARK -- on land or sea or foam -- is decent way to either fill or waste ninety-minutes.

David Ziegler (Treat Williams) is an American beach bum living on the Mexican shore with his buddy and business partner Paco (Antonio Fargas). Unfortunately, a lot of melodrama is about to be dumped in Davids' lap because his brother James (Carlo Mucari) got mixed up with a shady businessman, Rosentski (John Steiner), and figured to get rich by secretly recording the phone calls that Rosentski had made to the President of the U.S.! James mails David a CD he's made of these incriminating phone calls. The bad guys recruit Davids' ex-wife Liz (Janet Agren) to try to persuade David to hand over the CD, holding her debts over her head as a means of motivating her. David must ultimately battle the goons that Rosentski sends after him, and *also* do battle with a local one-eyed great white shark (named "Cyclops" by the natives) which has become a kind of personal nemesis for him.

Mediocre, fairly dull time waster could possibly have been more entertaining on a "so bad it's good" level, but very crude direction (by Tonino Ricci) and even cruder editing (by Gianfranco Amicucci) prevent the movie from being more fun. That isn't to say that there aren't some very amusing moments here and there, and things do pick up a little during the whole fight / pursuit sequence in the jungle. The music score by Stelvio Cipriani is fun even if it's not one of his best. The use of locations, at the least, is adequate. Williams doesn't look too happy to be here, but Fargas is rather engaging, Swedish beauty Agren offers some appreciable eye candy, and Steiner, the ubiquitous Brit character actor of so many Italian exploitation items, is a passable villain. And as one can see the story is pretty damn silly.

By the way, unless the word "shark" is used for its multiple meanings, the viewer should be aware that there's actually only one killer fish in this thing.

Five out of 10.

Until near the end, this movie cannot seem to decide what it is. Is it an action film, a horror movie, or a crime movie? It won't take you long to figure out what kind of movie it is, it's a boring movie! Good cast is completely wasted in one of the most contrive and lazily produced Italian films I've seen. Good fight scenes and some gore, but that is basically it. Nothing else worth mentioning, besides the cheesy soundtrack. Treat Williams... I don't believe I've ever seen him in a movie that didn't have lots and lots of water in it. Sheesh. Avoid this flick, not worth the trouble.

"James Ziegler" (Carlo Mucari) is a young man who likes to live dangerously and as a result decides to blackmail a rich and influential mobster for approximately $2 million in diamonds. Upon receiving the payment he then double-crosses them and flies to Mexico to see his brother "David Ziegler" (Treat Williams) who lives on a beach near shark-infested waters. Unfortunately, as soon as James arrives in Mexico he is murdered and the mob subsequently targets David who they believe now possesses the disk that implicates them in criminal activity. And these mobsters are more than willing to kill everybody associated with David to get what they want. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this wasn't a great movie by any means and could have been better if it had a bit more depth or attention to detail. For example, in one specific scene a bomb was placed on a boat but it didn't show who actually put it there. So for a moment it inadvertently appeared that David's loyal friend "Paco" (Antonio Fargas) and possibly the village priest "Father Mattia" (Christopher Connelly) were the guilty parties. Likewise, a couple of the conversations involving Father Mattia were almost inaudible as well. Even so, it was still entertaining to a certain degree and because of that I rate it as just slightly below average.