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REVIEW: Many people blame Steven Spielberg’s 1975 Jaws for tarnishing the reputation of sharks.
But while its true that the hype surrounding cinema’s first real summer blockbuster certainly heightened people’s fears around what was lurking in the water, in truth, two James Bond movies (Thunderball and Live and Let Die) and Burt Reynolds’ 1969 Mexican-shot Shark! had already muddied the water and turned the tide of public opinion against the various aquatic species, whether they were apex predators or not.
That’s the premise at the heart of a new documentary – Sharksploitation – which has just washed up on horror specialist streaming service Shudder.
Helmed by Stephen Scarlata (a producer on 2013’s excellent look at the incredible-film-that-never-was Jodorowsky’s Dune) it takes a deep-dive into the Hollywood’s historical portrayal of denizens of the deep, from 1930s adventures like Tabu and The Sea Bat to no-budget 2022 tales like Shark Side of the Moon and Maneater. It’s timing couldn’t be better too, what with Jason Statham-headlining sequel Meg 2: The Trench due in Kiwi cinemas next week and The Black Demon recently arrived on local on-demand services.
As well as film-makers like horror legends Roger Corman (She Gods of Shark Reef) and Joe Dante (Piranha), Open Water writer-director Chris Kentis, Jaws screenwriter Carl Gottleib and Sharknado series helmer Anthony C. Ferrante, Scarlata also gets fascinating insight from marine biologists, Arizona State University professor and monster expert Emily Zarka and horror film historian Rebekah McKendry.
They reveal how sharks were initially given almost reverential treatment by moviemakers, until the 007 series began associating them with villains like Emilio Largo and Dr. Kananga and Shark! made the controversial decision to include actual footage of a stuntman’s unfortunate death from an attack (to make things worse, they exploited the success of Spielberg’s adaptation of Peter Benchley’s novel by re-releasing their film and re-titlting it Man-Eater that the height of Jaws-mania in the summer of ‘75).
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“Cujo didn’t stop people from buying dogs, but Jaws stopped people from getting in boats, or even just swimming in the water,” one commentator adroitly notes of the impact of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster movie.
As well as looking at the role of thalassophobia (an intense fear of large or deep water) in intensifying people’s reactions to Spielberg’s movie, Sharksploitation also suggests the marketing machine that accompanied Jaws (which, unusually for that era, used television spots to lure punters to cinemas and produced a breathtaking array of merchandise that encompassed everything from t-shirts to board games and the No. 1 song Dickie Goodman’s Mr. Jaws) and the young film-makers’ skill combined to strike a chord with audiences that meant it had a much more lasting impact than other “creature features”.
“I mean Cujo [the 1983 movie based on Stephen King’s award-winning novel] didn’t stop people from buying dogs, but Jaws stopped people from getting in boats, or even just swimming in the water,” one commentator adroitly notes, backed by archival news reports from the era.
That’s one of the many astute observations and revelations that litter this excellent primer to the Sharksploitation sub-genre that has ebbed and flowed – and occasionally exploded – over the subsequent near half-century since the tagline, “Do you like fish? Well, he likes you too…”, first surfaced.
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Deep Blue Sea brought the shark movie back into theatres – and vogue – in 1999.
You’ll learn how to spot a true Sharkspolitation flick (the shark has to defy the laws of physics and someone has to say “you’ve got to get out of the water” at some point, says McKendry.), that Jaws was immediately followed by a series of barely disguised rip-offs (1976’s Grizzly just relocated the action and changed the predator, while 1981’s Italian “homage” The Last Shark was successfully blocked from North American release due to allegations of plagiarism) and diminishingly effective sequels (Jaws 3-D was marred by the shark’s dorsal fin preventing the stereoscopic effect from truly working and it moving “with all the speed and feorcity of the Goodyear Blimp”) and after becoming a staple on popular TV shows (The Six Million Dollar Man, Gilligan’s Island, The Bionic Woman and, as everyone knows, Happy Days all had their shark episodes) became the subject of regular parodies (especially using John Williams’ iconic, terrifying theme).
One anecdote I particularly loved was Dante and others reminiscing on the shark comedy that never came to pass – Jaws 3, People 0. Developed by National Lampoon shortly after the success of Animal House, the treatment co-written by the great John (The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink) Hughes was pitched as an R-Rated comedy featuring then screen siren Bo Derek. However, there were other producers who wanted something more PG and so the project became chum.
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The publicity for 1969’s Shark! made much of the on-set death of one of its stuntmen, even keeping the footage in the finished movie.
Making clever use of split-screen technology to highlight thematic and aesthetic similarities, Scarlata also spends time detailing how Renny Harlin’s star-studded Deep Blue Sea revived interest in the genre at the end of the century, before the likes of Asylum and Syfy flooded DVD stores and streaming services with an array of increasing bizarre conceits (Mega Shark v Giant Octopus, Ouija Shark or Sharks of the Corn anyone?) and mid-budget Hollywood tried to strip things back to basics with movies like The Shallows and 47 Metres Down.
In the end, if nothing else, Sharksploitation will at least make you think twice about the cinematic vilification of the long and somewhat unfairly demonised “finned fiends” and/or seek out some of wild and wacky “gems” that have been created over the years – everything from 1996 Bollywood musical Aatank to 2002’s Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, which boasts a truly jaw-dropping one-liner.
Sharksploitation is now available to stream on Shudder.
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