Weird Wednesdays: Cruel Jaws
This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.
From the 1970s to the 1980s, the Italian film industry was on an utterly unstoppable spree of exploitation film releases. While noted legends such as Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci were releasing classics like Suspiria and The Beyond, the deeper industry at large became infamous for churning out tons of knockoffs of popular movies. From countless knockoffs of sci-fi action classics Escape from New York and Mad Max, to multiple attempts at mining the terror of Friedkin’s classic The Exorcist, and even the historical debauchery of Caligula, no genre was safe. Ripping off a movie is one thing, but these filmmakers got bolder in the ‘80s. After Ridley Scott’s Alien, directors Ciro Ippolito and Biagio Proietti got tired of waiting for James Cameron’s masterpiece Aliens and gave the world Alien 2: On Earth in 1980. A similarly impatient director by the name of Bruno Mattei was also unable to wait for James Cameron to deliver a classic and delivered Terminator 2 (also known as Shocking Dark) in 1989.
Mattei made an art form of the low-rent ripoff. From wholesale stealing Dawn of the Dead’s legendary score by Goblin for Hell of the Living Dead, to making thinly veiled remakes of American blockbusters (Robowar is Predator with a robot and Strike Commando is Rambo: First Blood Part 2 with one of the most unintentionally funny scenes of a child dying ever filmed, both films anchored by legendary shrieker/beefsteak Reb Brown), Mattei took what he wanted when he wanted it, operating under the “ask for forgiveness instead of permission” rule. By the ‘90s his style of knockoff had already wavered, with his contemporaries having already moved on to other work. Friends like the incredibly prolific sleazemaster Joe D’Amato and Troll 2’s infamous director Claudio Fragasso had helped to build this ripoff industry, but Bruno stood above them with a swan song in mind. If he could take on Cameron’s mechanical nightmare with ease, taking on Spielberg must have seemed like a reasonable thought at the time, and in 1995 he released Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws, better known simply as Cruel Jaws in most territories for obvious reasons.
Cruel Jaws is, appropriately enough, a fascinating beast of a film. While the basic plot directly apes Spielberg’s classic, it all feels like it’s been translated through a weirdo lens. There’s a cop, Francis Berger (played by David Luther), fish expert Bill Morrison (Gregg Hood), and a tough shark hunting man, Dag Soerensen (Richard Dew), who have to team up to stop a shark while the idiot mayor, Godfrey Jefferson (Kevin Dean), puts the pressure on them to keep the beaches open to tourism. The cop is pretty straightforward, the fish expert looks like Ed Begley Jr.’s illegitimate son, but Dag is the most distracting presence. Richard Dew is the spitting image of legendary wrestler and infamous racist Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea, but the version of Hulkster that practiced what he preached when it came to saying your prayers and eating your vitamins rather than getting juiced for inhuman musculature. It’s almost impossible not to imagine him punctuating every single line of dialogue with an enthusiastic “brother” and it makes the movie a million times funnier right out of the gate.
Beyond the familiar main plot, Dag also runs an aquarium with his sons Bob and Larry (Scott Silveria and Larry Zience) as well as being a single parent to his wheelchair-bound (yet still incredibly chipper) daughter Susy (Kristen Urso). Local businessman Samuel Lewis (George Barnes Jr.) has given him 30 days to cough up a bunch of rent money or lose his business, the kind of hassle one REALLY doesn’t need when there’s a shark devouring tourists like Joey Chestnut inhales hot dogs, both timeless 4th of July traditions. Most interestingly though, someone in Mattei’s camp (the script is credited to Mattei, Robert Feen, and Linda Morrison) clearly read Peter Benchley’s novel on which Spielberg’s classic is based, because this film introduces the book’s subplot of mafia goons putting pressure on the mayor to keep the beaches open, in this case a comical set of goons that really give new meaning to the threat that “you’ll be sleeping wit’ da fishes, see.”
Instead of the classic Independence Day celebration that is most associated with Jaws, the town of Hampton Bay, Florida is building up to their Regatta, a boat race for the unfamiliar. Naturally, the open beaches lead to shark-based carnage galore, and our ragtag team of heroes have to dodge a mix of landlords, mobsters, street toughs, and jilted girlfriends to save the day, and just maybe get enough reward money from the mayor to save the aquarium. While this sounds pretty basic and familiar, the vision on display here is like nothing ever seen before. The editing is comically choppy in a way that makes the stilted acting and bizarre dialogue (“go to the top of the tallest skyscraper in town, jump off it, and then GO FUCK YOURSELF”) even funnier than it would be on its own, the constantly clashing tone jumps without a moment’s notice, and the hilariously lamebrained attempts at killing the shark need to be seen to be believed (one guy fires a shotgun at the water, which would be ineffective enough, but then the boat he was on blows up in one of the most hilariously convoluted accidents ever committed to film). What really sets this film apart though is the completely obliterated line between plagiarism and outright theft, the very thing that has made this particular title incredibly hard to come across stateside until recently.
Cruel Jaws steals so liberally from other works that it could legally be considered a montage. You’ll see footage stolen from Jaws, Jaws 2, Jaws 3D, and Jaws: The Revenge, but you’ll also see footage from Joe D’Amato’s Deep Blood and Enzo G Castellari’s Great White, thereby giving this two separate degrees of theft, ripping off footage from two other Italian Jaws ripoffs. The wildest lifts of all though come from the auditory department. Some of the score was taken from Curse 2: The Bite. I was particularly amused to notice that the Regatta was scored to a piece of music that sounded wildly similar to Yello’s appropriately named track The Race, best known as the theme music to Jonathan Lynn’s Nuns on the Run, a bit of theft that people don’t seem to call out in most movie circles. There’s a good reason for that though, as only a few of us remember Nuns on the Run with any particular fondness, but everyone remembers a little movie called Star Wars, and in this movie, more than once, the opening fanfare to John Williams’ most classic of works is played alongside the events of the film with total sincerity. Apparently Mattei was not content to just borrow music that sounded like the infamous Jaws theme, and at one point, a viewer has to wonder if this is just an experiment in seeing how much you can steal without getting caught, much like how Ed Wood wanted to build entire movies around stock footage. Well he got caught, and, as a result, this movie wasn’t legally available in the US until Severin got the rights to release it in 2020.
There’s no telling how anyone got the go-ahead to legally put this title on shelves. It’s a wonder that Morgan was able to program it for Weird Wednesday, an attempt that I was told took many years to happen. But, thank god it did, because no film in the Spielberg series features a guy dressed in hot pink blindly firing a shotgun in all directions while screaming “I’LL GET YOU, MOTHERFUCKING SHARK!” Cruel Jaws feels dangerous in a fun way, like watching a friend spray graffiti on a government building. It doesn’t matter that the graffiti is incomprehensible trash, it’s exhilarating and fun in the moment. And maybe, if the friend is anything like my man Bruno Mattei, the graffiti will have a cheeky seal playing pranks on people to make things just a little more fun.
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Jackie Stargrove is a writer, singer, movie host, and the smallest pillar of the Austin film community.