I have never seen Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, but I have seen Bruno Mattei’s Cruel Jaws close to 10 times. While I know that might make me a terrible cinephile, I have to counter with this question: Does Jaws end with the mayor getting pushed into a body of water by a wisecracking seal?
I didn’t think so.
As that famous John Williams-esque theme song plays in the background — Star Wars — a shark made up of mostly stock footage is killing the residents of Beach Town or some other wholly generic name. Shark professor Billy shows up in time to help the police solve these murders, with help from a Hulk Hogan look-alike and his handicapped daughter who run a dolphin park.
Unfortunately, the mayor and his son aren’t buying these terrific tales of shark murder because the big sailing regatta is coming up. When all hell breaks loose, he’s forced by the sheriff to offer a reward for the head of the shark, which leads to a mad, mad, mad, mad chase for this underwater monster. At one point, a character quips, “We’re gonna need a bigger helicopter!”
Did I mention that the mafia is in on this, too, somehow?
Titled Jaws 5: Cruel Jaws overseas (this time … it’s economical), this is famed director Mattei’s rude Italian hand gesture to both the sharksploitation genre and international copyright laws, with characters who scream a badly translated script at each other, usually while pretending to look at a shark.
And so, after hearing all that, once again I have to ask: Does Jaws have that? —Louis Fowler