The Last Shark (1981) Revisited – Horror Movie Review
A few months ago, our good friend Chris Bumbray posted an article on our website about a banned shark movie coming to Blu-ray, albeit in a non-region A form. At first, I thought I knew exactly what he was talking about. I assumed it was the ever-popular Cruel Jaws which was already released by Severin Films and even had a Jaws 5 cover art for a limited time. Well, I was wrong. It was actually a movie I had never heard of. It was called The Last Shark or maybe it’s called Great White depending on which site you look it up on. Being the historian of the group here at JoBlo Horror Originals, I decided I needed to take on the burden of watching it. What could be so bad about a movie from an important producer, that made 18 million dollars in 1981, and that had Vic Morrow to appeal to American audiences? Well, quite frankly, a lot. Like, a whole lot. Grab your popcorn and try to prepare yourself for the black sheep of rip-offs and the ultimate Jaws clone. This is The Last Shark.
Mercifully, you don’t have to worry about a region free player or spending the money to buy the disc if you don’t want to, this movie is available on Tubi currently (bless them) and I’m sure even if it goes away it will come back. The synopsis sounds familiar, a little too familiar. A town is under siege by a great white shark with some people in town taking on themselves to handle it. The mayor is a slimeball with no accountability and even a helicopter stands no match for the power of the shark. A group of kids end up stranded in the ocean along with the main hunters, of which one of them dies, and at the end the shark’s head is blown up. Wait, wasn’t that just kind of a shorter retelling of Jaws 1 and 2 mixed together? To paraphrase Doctor Loomis in the first Halloween, as a matter of fact, it was. This is prime time Italian cinema thievery. This is along the same lines as Robowar from 1988 being a weird mish mash of RoboCop and Predator, yes go watch it, or Shocking Dark from the next year just having the plots of Terminator and Aliens loosely followed and even releasing it in Italy as Terminator 2. Yes, also go watch that. While those movies were allowed to gloriously exist, The Last Shark was successfully sued and pulled from theaters after just two weeks, but we will get there.
Behind the scenes, it was a group of Italian all stars that put the movie together. The writers were Vincenzo Mannino, Marc Princi, Ugo Tucci, and an uncredited Ramon Bravo. Bravo was mostly a cameraman for things like Zombie and Licence to Kill but wrote another absolutely crazy Jaws rip-off in 77 called Tintorera. Tucci was a production designer on Once upon a Time in the West before being a producer also on Fulci’s Zombie and while Princi doesn’t have much to his name, Mannino was fairly prolific. He also wrote House on the Edge of the Park, New York Ripper, Murder Rock, and Devil Fish. You know, awesome Italian horror that more people need to give their time to. The direction of The Last Shark came down to Enzo Castellari who is no stranger to a good old-fashioned rip-off film. His Escape from the Bronx and 1990: Bronx Warriors are cash ins on Escape from New York, and he made a Jaws pastiche earlier with The Shark Hunter in 1979. Credit where credit is due though as his Keoma is one of the great underseen Spaghetti Westerns and Inglorious Bastards, no not that one, is a great exploitation flick.
The movie needed someone to fill the spot for one of the three big actors. By 1981, Richard Dryfuss was a massive success, Roy Scheider continued his Oscar nominated career, and Robert Shaw had passed away. In stepped Vic Morrow who was an Emmy nominated and accomplished actor in his own right. It helped that he worked with the director recently on one of his other movies already that just happened to be released after. Morrow steps into the grizzled shoes of Robert Shaw’s Quint with playing shark hunter Ron Hammer. He is joined by author Peter Benton, boy that sounds an awful lot like Peter Benchley author of Jaws, who is played by James Franciscus who got his start in episodic TV in the 50s and 60s but was no stranger to Italian horror with his role in The Cat o Nine Tails. Much of the rest of the cast is portrayed by Italian regulars who would appear in dozens of productions in the 70’s and 80s which was a popular thing to do. Italian crew and most of the cast with an American star thrown in.
The plot is about as straightforward as it gets. I genuinely stopped taking notes on this thing pretty early on and just marveled at what I was witnessing. A shark kills people and the author and hunter are worried about public safety, but this version’s mayor denies it as he is looking to become the governor. The shark then kills more people and so the mayor can’t deny it any longer, so the hunt begins. Not only are Hammer and Benton on the case, especially after Benton’s daughter loses half of her leg, but so are a whole town of hunters. The mayor feels guilty and takes matter in his own hands by jumping in a helicopter with meat and the intention of hoisting the shark in the air to suffocate it. Calling it now, Jurassic World absolutely stole this idea with their ill-fated CEO and I won’t be convinced otherwise. This fails and the shark kills the mayor before the two main heroes use dynamite to blow themselves out of a cave the shark has trapped them in. The shark traps Hammer in the sunken helicopter before dragging him and drowning him. Not to waste a good body or weapon, Benton feeds Hammer’s corpse to the shark and detonates the dynamite before punching a reporter Die Hard style and oh my god Die Hard also ripped off The Last Shark.
None of what I just mentioned makes The Last Shark particularly good, but it is charming as hell in its futile attempt to be great. It uses miniatures to achieve awesome results and has a lot more gore than you’d expect. The author’s daughter losing her leg and especially the mayor being bitten in half are standouts that make me think of the other good Italian gorefests of that era. Vic Morrow is having too much fun and honestly, it’s hard to tell what his accent is supposed to be half the time, but his energy and his outfits are amazing. He would end up working alongside Spielberg in Twilight Zone: The Movie which is interesting considering this was the movie that was too close to being Jaws and would be taken down. It’s hard to get a solid answer on why the movie was successfully sued. Some outlets say it had to do with the Italian score being far to similar to the John Williams classic while others say that it was sued for being too close to Peter Benchley’s original work. either way that’s a wild way for it to go down considering the movie just feels like someone trying to retell the plots to Jaws 1 and 2 except they haven’t seen it in 40 years. Even the shark looks extremely fake but also very cool and endearing. A sequel was even considered but the big goofy guy broke down which ruled that out. Unfortunate if you ask me.
The lead up to the movie and its release were promising. The advertising and distribution team went HARD. The movie was picked up by Film Ventures International for distribution and they dumped in 4 million into advertising. The president of Film Ventures at the time brought in lemon sharks in portable tanks, inflatable sharks with Great White printed on the side as that’s what they were going to release it as, and even special pop up book materials to a Vegas convention to promote the movie.
Great White was released on March 5th, 1982 and made somewhere between 3 to 24 million in its first two weeks before Universal won its lawsuit and had the movie pulled. Just like that it was gone, at least in the US. It was released in other regions under different titles and in a very fun and more fitting than I thought possible, other Italian rip off movies Cruel Jaws and Deep Blood stole footage from this movie to fill out the run time and save money on theirs. I find something very comforting in that.
The movie is currently available in an awful and cheap barebones DVD in our region but if you want a Blu-ray and have the means to play it, you can buy the very fun version from places like Diabolik. If you want to just catch one of the most infamous Jaws rip off movies ever then you can catch it on Tubi for now but even if it leaves, it will always come back. This Great White should be one of the Last Sharks that you ever watch, and I promise you won’t be disappointed. It has so much to see and falls hard into the so bad its good realm with even the Rifftrax boys taking advantage. Don’t let the lawsuit or reputation scare you off, this movie is more than worth your time.
A couple of the previous episodes of The Black Sheep can be seen at the bottom of this article. To see more, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
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