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.
Review of The Last Shark
