La notte degli squali

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.

NIGHT OF THE SHARKS begins with shots of a shark swimming languidly along, while David Ziegler (Treat Williams) and his friend Paco (Antonio "Huggy Bear" Fargus) sun themselves on a nearby beach.

Oh no!

The shark wakes up and kills an unknown extra! David and Paco continue to relax. We discover that, in addition to sunbathing, David likes to yell at sharks.

Meanwhile, seemingly in some other movie, David's brother has absconded with something from "the mob". So, these two storylines intersect, which somehow makes this movie even less intriguing.

Unfortunately, there's just not enough shark action, especially considering the title. Mostly, this is about the brother's troubles being brought down on David and poor Paco, interrupting their relaxation to the nth degree. Fans of Mr. Williams and Huggy Bear will be ecstatic. Everyone else will probably need a cranial enema...

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.

I gave it a 2 instead of a 1 because I think "The Wild Women of Wongo" is worse. This is an exercise in patience. It's like having your teeth cleaned by a bad dental hygienist. There's no plot. There's no logic. There is certainly no acting (although the shark has some quality dialogue). We don't wonder about anything. We don't know how people got where they got. It's always amazing to me how things like this even get released. I agree with the previous writer that it isn't even funny bad. I know. It's about 90 minutes long and that will fill up about that much space on a DVD collection. It's like a paperweight. Or a bad painting you bought at a starving artists' sale. It covers the crack in the wall.

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.