Port Harbor is a quiet, nice little town getting ready for a competition between windsurfers. Suddenly a gigantic great white spoils the party by killing multiple people. Mayor Wells doesn't want an economic breakdown of the town and orders the festivities to continue, but will soon regret it.....
L'Ultimo Squalo, also know as The Last Shark, Great White and The Last Jaws, starts off as cheesy as it can get. A typical 80's douchebag performs some tricks on his surfboard while one of the cheesiest songs I've ever heard is played in the background. I was yearning for the shark to kill all these douches after 5 minutes already.
The cast obviously is all but special. The characters and actors performing them are pretty much all boring as hell, with the exception of one guy----> Vic Morrow. Morrow plays the role of rough sharkhunter Ron Hamer, a character that's almost identical to Jaws' Quin, and does very well. Robert Shaw and Vic Morrow even slightly look like each other. The latter one died a horrifying death a year after The Last Shark's release. While filming for John Landis' part of the movie The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) a helicopter went too close to a detonated explosion on set. The tail of the chopper exploded causing the chopper the crash onto the set where it decapitated Vic Morrow and child actor Myca Dinh Le and crushed another child actor called Renee Shin-Yi Chen. A story that saddens you even more when you see the footage of the crash.
Back to the movie, that strangely enough is quite boring. There is some boring dialogue, under water shots that aren't really clear and some atrocious stock-footage where Castellari thinks we can't see the difference between a dolphin and a gigantic great white... The best parts of the movie are obviously the ones where the, fake, shark is present in full glory. Every now and then he like to point his head out of the water and roar. True it's cheesy, but it's the good kind of cheesyness.
There are one or two scenes that really stand out. One being the ''Helicopter scene'' where the shark manages to pull someone out of the chopper, bite his legs off and then just drags the whole helicopter under water. Another good scene, probably my favorite, is the part where a part of a pier comes loos and drifts to the open sea with multiple people on it. These people are then hunted by the shark with no where to go.
L'Ultimo Squalo isn't all trash, but it's less entertaining that what I had hoped for. The great white itself is freaking epic but I would have liked to see him a bit more during the movie. Overall I just thought the pace of the movie was to slow. Castellari produces some legitimate good scenes not to mention the excellent soundtrack by Guido and Maurizio De Angelis. I just would have liked it all a bit more exciting. Perhaps I'll find that in Bruno Mattei's 1995 Jaws rip-off ''Cruel Jaws'', which I've heard used shark scenes from this movie.
Fun Facts (Source: IMDB)
Shortly before the film's release, Universal Pictures filed suit against the producers, claiming the film was too similar to Jaws
(1975), and the Australian distributors, for breach of copyright
regarding Peter Benchley's book "Jaws". Universal won an injunction, and
the film was pulled from theaters.
The video was released in Japan as "Jaws Returns", a supposed "sequel" to Jaws (1975). The box cover art contains the same Jaws font and logo used on all promotional materials for the Steven Spielberg film.
Released in Spain as if it was the third part of Jaws (1975).
Director Enzo G. Castellari thought about making a sequel, appropriately titled "L'ultimo Squalo 2". But because of the mechanical shark being damaged after shooting, the sequel was never made.
No comments:
Post a Comment