Colin's 2010 Movies #5 & 6: The Last Shark and Jaws 5

It’s been said that for filmmakers in Italy, studios don’t ask you what your movie is like, they ask you what movie is your movie like. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of 1981’s The Last Shark by Enzo Castellari (who also directed the original Inglorious Bastards). Castellari’s film tells the story of a coastal community terrorized by a monstrous great white shark, following a writer and a grizzled sea-dog determined to kill the shark and a stubborn mayor who refuses to close the beaches until it’s too late. The film’s similarities to a certain 1975 shark attack movie and its 1978 sequel were so conspicuous that Universal Studios successfully sued the filmmakers and had it pulled from American theatres.

For those able to look past the glaring similarities though, The Last Shark is really entertaining for a movie of its type. The catchy dance music that kicks in from the first minute, playing over a doomed sailboarder doing tricks in the surf before getting eaten perfectly sets the tone for the fun energetic proceedings. We find out there’s a big windsurfing regatta coming up, which inevitably turns into a spectacular shark smorgasbord, leading to various groups sailing out to hunt the beast. The film alternates between using a decent animatronic shark mock-up that rises out of the water and grainy stock footage of sharks (there’s an awesome scene where two TV news reporters are complaining that they didn’t get nice enough shots of the shark attacking the regatta and then decide to just cut in some stock footage since no one will know the difference). In the film’s best setpiece the shark drags down the mayor’s helicopter by the hook and line he’d suspended from it.

One of the things about the latter two Jaws movies that always bothered me was how much time they wasted with the human characters. They seemed to think they had to live up to the original Jaws by being a heartfelt human drama first and an entertaining genre movie second (if at all). The Last Shark has no such compunctions, being comfortable to just be a cheesy fun shark attack movie, with a lean well-paced script always building to the next thrilling action sequence.




Not so for Bruno Mattei’s 1995 Italian TV-produced Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws. Mattei, master of cinematic plagiarism, made an almost scene for scene remake of The Last Shark, just with the addition of eye-pealingly obnoxious unlikeable characters and tedious boring subplots. All the shark sequences are either recreated with new actors or consist of footage ripped directly from Castellari’s film. Only Bruno Mattei could make an even more shameless rip-off of an already shameless rip-off of Jaws. We’re probably lucky this movie didn’t make the universe implode.

And just in case the general premise wasn’t blatant enough, the script throws in such lines as ‘It probably is the shark, it’s very rare for these waters; but this jaw-span just doesn’t convince me!’ and ‘All it really knows how to do is swim, eat and make baby sharks’ and ‘We’re gonna need a bigger helicopter!’ It’s hard not to admire the guts of a filmmaker who’d steal so much from Spielberg as recently as the mid-90ties. The film’s score also borrows from Star Wars just for good measure.

While I can’t really recommend Jaws 5 as an entertainment, since it’s virtually the same film as The Last Shark but with more annoying characters, it is kind of impressive as an achievement in low-budget editing wizardry. Here sixty-four year old director, Bruno Mattei was given a presumably meagre budget from an Italian TV network and managed to turn out a Jaws sequel somewhat better than the last one (Jaws 4: The Crackdown) without filming a single new frame of underwater footage or any footage of a robotic shark. There’s even a few scenes in the heroes’ SeaWorld type facility where crowd noise is heard applauding the dolphins, where no crowd is seen and the set is obviously too small to seat a crowd anywhere around the pool. Take that, restrictively small budget!

So, for fans of shark movies, The Last Shark is well worth checking out. And for fans of Italian rip-off artists, Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws is a one-of-a-kind example.

Colin's 2010 Movies #4: The White Buffalo

The White Buffalo (1977) is an odd beast. Part monster movie, part existential western, it follows Charles Bronson playing Wild Bill Hickok as he hunts down a massive albino buffalo that haunts his dreams. As he gets closer he discovers that the buffalo has been terrorizing the prairies, killing everyone in its path. He forms an uneasy alliance with Crazy Horse (Will Sampson), who’s also hunting the buffalo out of revenge after it killed his daughter.

The monstrously huge buffalo is amazingly well realized using an elaborate animatronic rig and makes a pretty scary sight charging down unstoppably on its victims. Director J. Lee Thompson builds atmosphere around each attack brilliantly, filming them with icy blue lighting on snowfields at night which gives the buffalo scenes a beautiful nightmarish tone.

The film actually has a surprising amount of subtext too, most likely thanks to Richard Sale’s script, adapted from his own novel. A lot of time is spent with the two protagonists travelling to find the buffalo, and we see the kind of casual violence they live their lives with in order to survive on the frontier. As they work together, we’re always aware of the racial tensions between them; they both acknowledge that if they survive fighting the buffalo together, they’ll never meet again as friends.

We’re also clearly meant to wonder what the white buffalo represents. Is it the devil tormenting Hickok for all the violent acts in his past? Is it the white man, whose progress across the prairies seems just as destructive and unstoppable to Crazy Horse? There seems to be a lot more going on under the surface than in a typical nature-run-amok movie.

Being a decidedly offbeat genre-bender, audiences didn’t really know what to make of it at the time and it underperformed at the box office. Since then, it has faded into obscurity and is well past due for a DVD release.

Colin's 2010 Movies #2: Shutter Island

I wanted to like this movie a lot more than I did. From a technical standpoint Martin Scorsese does a phenomenal job crafting a creepy, foreboding, 1954 period atmosphere around Ashecliffe, the island-bound asylum for the criminally insane where two federal marshals are called to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Leonardo DiCaprio also does a great job portraying the driven, haunted marshal Teddy Daniels, whose wife died in a fire caused by an arsonist (Elias Koteas in a brief but memorably slimy cameo) who may or may not have been committed to Ashecliffe. Teddy must uncover the truth of what goes on at Ashecliffe while coping with vivid dreams of his dead wife and his wartime experiences liberating Dachau from the Nazis.

The problem lies with the ending. Certain twist endings need to be banned. After being used over and over, there’s just no way they can be surprising or compelling any more. Shutter Island’s third act reveal is one that most people could probably guess at from the trailer and once you get there, it’s hard not to feel disappointed that it’s all the story amounts to.

It’s a shame because the film has so much else going for it. It looks absolutely beautiful especially the overhead shots of the storm-beaten, dreary island, and there are lots of clever editing tricks used to heighten the tension, like the continuity of a person’s movement or expression being jarringly mismatched between shots, and shots that seem to last a little too long or too short before cutting. It manages to make everything subtly unnerving.

While Shutter Island is less of a horror film than the trailers seemed to suggest there are a few impressively creepy sequences, the standout being a trip through Ashecliffe’s ward C, a medieval dungeon-like fortress reserved for the most violent inmates, filled with dripping water and dark stone passageways. I wanted the film to spend more time there.

There’s no faulting the acting either, with Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow playing the eerily polite but infuriatingly unhelpful psychiatrists running the facility, and Jackie Earle Haley in another neat cameo as a badly beaten up psychopath. DiCaprio really sells the emotional impact of the story, keeping us grounded in Teddy’s increasing paranoia and grief-stricken memories.

When it was all over, everything Shutter Island did right just increased my disappointment. All the talent on display made me wish it was in service of a better story. Other reviews I’ve read have been willing to look past the script’s predictability and just enjoy the brilliant filmmaking technique at work but for me it just wasn’t enough to justify trotting out that lame twist for the umpteen thousandth time.

Colin's 2010 Movies #1: Bad Lieutenant

Starting the year off on the wrong foot, I checked out Abel Ferrara’s notorious 1992 Catholic guilt-athon, Bad Lieutenant, starring Harvey Keitel. Since Werner Herzog’s quasi-remake made it into both Ryan’s and my own top ten favourite films of 2009, I felt I should check out the original to see how the two compared. The answer is not too well. While Ferrara’s original clearly has more on its mind than “Let’s cast Nicholas Cage as a completely deranged, drug-addled cop and see what happens”, there were some issues that kept it from working for me.

The film mostly follows the Lieutenant around through his daily routine of drug abuse, gambling, stealing, coercing innocent girls into a striptease and so on. What little plot there is involves his investigation of the rape of a nun, and his fall into massive debt from betting on the Dodgers against the Mets in the National League Championship Series. The nun forgives her attackers, local boys who she knows, and the Lieutenant must decide whether to forgive them as well to redeem himself for his sins and lack of faith, both as a Catholic and as a New Yorker (since betting against the Mets is apparently tantamount to blasphemy).

The problem is how inaccessible most of the film’s symbolism is. Being neither a Catholic nor a baseball fan, much of the movie’s message didn’t resonate with me at all. The baseball subplot is conveyed almost entirely through radio announcer chatter which didn’t mean a thing to me and I had to do a bit of research to understand what was supposed to be going on. Supposedly there was some kind of parallel drawn between the Lieutenant’s loss of faith and Daryl Strawberry leaving the Mets to play against them with the Dodgers but it sailed over my head like a pop fly ball to center field.

Which is a shame, because the movie has some really powerful moments and Keitel is clearly giving his all to play an extremely unlikeable character; a screaming tirade against his hallucinated vision of a bloodied Jesus Christ in the middle of a church was a particular standout. The film’s unstructured slice-of-sleazebag-life approach was novel and engaging as well. I just wish it had been a bit less esoteric with its subtext so it could’ve had more of an impact on me in the end.