The Last Shark (1982)

i must have seen a different film!!

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This movie is an absolute gem. When it comes to great bad movies this ranks near the top with the best of them. It's such a rip-off of Jaws that it feel like a parody. The shark looks awful; they use a bunch of documentary footage intertwined with the footage of their shark and both are shot differently which is very noticeable. I though Jaws the Revenge will forever be the best terrible shark movie I'll ever see but this is even better. The way the shark behaves are highly unrealistic and all the attack scenes are great. This is just a great laugh-out loud comedy, there is one scene of someone dying and getting catapulted into the air which they show again later as someone in the movie filmed that moment, it's like the director knew how terrible and hilarious it was and wanted to give us another chance to see it, God bless him. for that and for making this beautiful moving picture.

Obvious mannequins are propelled skyward for some unexplained (and unintentionally funny) reason, as a shark, or in some scenes, a dolphin, terrorizes a small coastal community, just like in that other shark movie. Intro scene has seemingly never-ending windsurfing footage culminating with the shark causing the guy and his board to explode out and fly up out of the water! The bite marks in what's left of the board look more like razor slashes, at angles which could not have possibly been made by a shark, as we go back to the "bite radius" bit from Jaws. And remember when the head in the boat scared Hooper (and us, the audience) in Jaws? There is even a rip off of that here, as we find an arm bitten off by the shark. And, aww, innit that cute, they even tied a pink balloon around the shark to track it. Are you kidding me? Is that the low rent substitute of Quint's yellow barrels, pink ballons? There actually is a little bit of tension toward the end of this one, in between bouts of unintended comedy, and some of the modelwork is amusing, The shark looks okay at a distance or at high angles, but when we're shown the shark at closer angles and for longer amounts of time, we realise just how inferior to Jaws it really is. Ron succumbs to a fate similar to Quint's, in Peter Benchley's original novel, but the film is too derivative and slowly paced to amount to much more than a third-rate ripoff. Such a close ripoff, in fact, that Steven Spielberg and co. took legal action against the makers of this one, and had the movie effectively banned.

The story of Great White (or "The Last Shark" depending on where it was released) is more interesting than anything that appears in the final product. A thinly veiled Jaws rip-off, the film was released in the early 1980s in the US with lots of advance ads, but quickly pulled from release following a lawsuit from Universal Studios, which allowed the film to generate a cult following leaving many people wondering what they missed. After viewing the end product, not a heck of a lot. The Jaws storyline is virtually duplicated here with a summer beach town suddenly becoming the feeding ground of a 35-foot Great White shark. Minor derivation - instead of the town sheriff being the focal character - we get James Franciscus as a popular local novelist (named Peter Benton, obviously a riff on Peter Benchley the author of the original Jaws). Truthfully, 1982 was a bit late to be ripping off Jaws since at that point we already had Jaws 2, Piranha and the soon to released Jaws 3-D (which is a worse film than this one). The film does have some moments of suspense as most killer fish movies generally do, but they are almost in spite of the methodical plodding direction and often senseless screenplay. A nicely done opening attack (which keeps the beast off camera) sets the stage, but too much time is devoted to a rather tired subplot about a politician running for re-election and there are far too many moments of people acting foolishly. Whenever the shark is around, you know some idiot will accidentally fall into the water to become shark bait. Even worse, characters go off to ostensibly "hunt" the shark with no set plan on what to do with it if they find it, resulting in at least three sequences where someone is maimed or killed because of idiocy. The sequence where the local politician attempts to capture the shark by dangling bait tied to the tow cable of a helicopter is especially preposterous, because he has no plan in place of what to do if he finds the shark and given the film's pattern, you know one of the passengers will fall out. The film tries to blend in elements of Jaws 2 by including a gaggle of teenagers, including Franciscus's daughter, and a helicopter sequence. Kudos for making the politician, played Joshua Sinclair, relatively congenial and proactive, and not the usual douchebag that popped up in Jaws and its ilk - he truly does not deserve the fate that the movie has for him. Franciscus is actually fairly solid, while Vic Morrow in the Robert Shaw shark hunter role is an unintentional hoot overacting with a highly suspicious Scottish accent. The over-synthesized score is a misfire. The direction is uneven and heavy-handed, with a distinct problem towards pacing. The cheap visuals hardly help. Apparently the special effects budget only covered the top third of the shark, because the rest is done with stock footage that fails to match up. Oftentimes, the film substitutes footage of a shark (sometimes not even a Great White) that is obviously considerably smaller than the shark in the film is supposed to be - apparently hoping no viewers would notice the huge discrepancies. Much of the underwater footage is murky and the film's mid-film "action" piece where the shark breaks through safety barriers and crashes a wind-surfing regatta is unintentionally funny as it basically shows a red buoy that get caught on the shark (a la the yellow ones in Jaws) systematically knocking all of the wind surfers off their boards in a straight line, but yet with all those young flailing surfers in the water it manages to snag none of them, instead opting to knock a small boat up in the air to munch on an obnoxious character. Decidedly underwhelming, but worth a look if nothing else better is on, and certainly better than last summer's execrable Piranha 3-D.

the last shark(aka;great white)is an Italian made jaws ripoff that is pretty good not bad like most of the killer shark movies made after jaws, its James Franciscus in the Chief Brody role although he's not a police- man.and the late great;Vic Morrow in his next to last roles as the shark hunter.the shark is sort of like a cheaper version of the jaws shark,looks kind of rubbery but not too fake looking.as compared to the original jaws it pales in comparison,but its enjoyable.the one thing i found annoying is the soundtrack,i think they could have used a better score.i think the Goblins would of been good.(suspiria,deep red)but all in all its not bad. i was a little confused about the ending but maybe i missed something,i did see it on google video since i cant find it on DVD or even VHS.i guess universal is fighting that.the title last shark makes no sense.i think a better title would have been killer jaws,but that would really irritate Spielberg and universal,anyway its worth a look.like i said one of the better jaws ripoffs,the bad ones were jaws of death,tintotera,and up from the depths.now those are bad.