Director – Enzo G. Castellari, Screenplay – Mark Princi, Producers – Maurizio Amati & Ugo Tucci, Photography – Alberto Spagnoli, Music – Guido De Angelis & Maurizio De Angelis, Production Design – Francesco Vanorio. Production Company – UTI/Horizon Productions.
Cast
James Franciscus (Peter Benton), Vic Morrow (Ron Hamer), Micky Pignatelli (Gloria Benton), Joshua Sinclair (Mayor William Wells), Stefania Girolami (Jenny Benton), Gian Marco Lari (Billy Joe Wells), Timothy Brent (Bob Martin)
Plot
When one of his daughter’s friends fails to return from sailboarding, writer Peter Benton and his fishermen friend Ron Hamer go out searching. They return with the end of the sailboard that has been bitten off. Hamer is certain that a shark was responsible. A major sailboarding regatta is due to get underway but Mayor William Wells refuses to cancel. Shark nets are placed up around the lagoon. However, the shark proceeds to tear its way through the netting and starts devouring the sailboarders. Peter and Hamer determine to hunt down and kill the shark.
Following the success of Jaws (1975), Killer Shark Movies became huge. There were a number of imitators of Jaws for several years after. Among these, The Last Shark has a notoriety. It was a Mockbuster – a lookalike/sound-alike film designed to piggyback on the success of another hit – way before anybody coined the term in the 2000s.
The Last Shark was an Italian production that was brought up by US distributor Film Ventures and released in 1982 under the title Great White. It did very successfully at the box-office where it earned a purported $20 million (although I am a bit suspicious of such a high figure – it would mean that it earned more than John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) did at the box-office). However, Universal, the producers of the Jaws films, launched a lawsuit claiming plagiarism and copyright infringement and successfully had the film’s release blocked (there are various claims that this occurred within one week to a month of release). The financial losses on this caused Film Ventures to file for bankruptcy and close doors in 1985.
Before we start dismissing The Last Shark out of hand – most commentators get no further beyond “a copy of Jaws so blatant that the studio sued to stop its release” – it is worth noting the similarities and points of difference. First of all, there were a mountain of such Jaws copies that came out during this period – Mako, The Jaws of Death (1976), Tintorera (1977), while there were a number of other works such as Orca (1977), Tentacles (1977), Barracuda (1978) and Piranha (1978) that simply gave us Jaws with different aquatic creatures, and others like Grizzly (1976) and Claws (1977) that located the basics on land. Most of them copied the basic tropes from Jaws with little distinguishing difference, some more than others. It is less a case that The Last Shark was a direct ripoff of Jaws than that it was the most blatant among several. Director Enzo G. Castellari had also made the earlier The Shark Hunter (1979), although that is more of an adventure film that was repackaged with a shark title.
The shark attacks
There are certainly a number of similarities between The Last Shark and Jaws. For Murray Hamilton’s mayor trying to keep the beaches open with an eye only towards holiday revenue, there is Joshua Sinclair’s mayor insistent on a sailboarding regatta going ahead, only for the shark to proceed to disrupt it. (The Last Shark goes one beyond Jaws in this regard and actually has the mayor devoured by the shark). For Robert Shaw’s old timer sea dog we get Vic Morrow with atrociously fake Scottish accent in essentially the same role. In place of Roy Scheider’s sheriff, we get James Franciscus as writer Peter Benton, which seems intended to get as close to the name of Peter Benchley, the author the original Jaws novel, as it is possible to get.
There are also some undeniable differences. One of these is that there is not the extended last half of Jaws out on the water in the boat hunting the shark. In its place, we get some underwater diving scenes with James Franciscus and Vic Morrow, which are interspersed with several different interested parties – the mayor’s son and a bunch of teenagers who steal his father’s boat to go hunting the shark and a sensation-seeking tv crew who want to lure the shark in closer to the beach. That and a series of shark attack set-pieces. There is a rather ridiculous one borrowed from Jaws 2 (1978) where a shark succeeds in bringing down a helicopter. These come with a degree of hyped melodrama, including divers trapped underwater and the climactic scenes with the shark towing the pier away.
One thing that can be said is that rather than a cheap ripoff of Jaws, The Last Shark is actually one of the best budgeted films that Italian director Enzo G. Castellari made – it certainly better cast than most of his other films (see below). That said, there are still undeniable corners cut. In many of the scenes where we see the shark, it is represented by stock footage. The reason we saw little of the shark in Jaws was because the life-sized mock-up rarely worked and for the same reasons here we see even less of the shark. When we do get to, it seems an immobile mock-up bursting out of the water.
Enzo G. Castellari’s other genre films are:– the giallo psycho-thriller Cold Eyes of Fear (1971), the revenge film The House By the Edge of the Lake (1979), 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982), Bronx Warriors 2 (1983), the post-holocaust action film The New Barbarians/Warriors of the Wasteland (1983), the action film Light Blast (1985) and Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989). These days Castellari is perhaps better remembered as director of the original Inglorious Bastards (1978).
