The Big Picture
Jaws was a sensation unlike any movie before it: it launched not only the idea of the summer blockbuster but the mass fear of sharks and the ocean that remains prevalent to this day. It also kick-started a trend for shark movies that in one way or another took great inspiration from Jaws, as the documentary Sharksploitation explores in great detail. Some just decided marine predators were a cool angle, like Piranha; some went with the same premise but in a different location, like Grizzly; others were so like Jaws that they got into legal trouble, and the most egregious of these offenders was a janky little TV-movie from Italy imaginably titled Cruel Jaws. Not only did it look like Jaws and swim like Jaws, but it lifted footage directly from the entire Jaws franchise, and when it came to 21st-century home media releases, this presented a bit of a problem. But despite its blatant robbery, and probably because of its inherent laziness, it turned out to be a movie so amazingly bad that it is actually very entertaining.
How Much Does ‘Cruel Jaws’ Rip Off From ‘Jaws’?
So here’s how the plot of Cruel Jaws goes – see if anything sounds familiar (and I advise against making it a drinking game for those who actually plan on waking up tomorrow): Dag Sorensen (Richard Dew) runs a marine leisure park with his family, but it’s making no money and the local tycoon is getting ready to evict the gang so he can turn the land into a resort. Billy (Gregg Hood) is a cocky young marine biologist whose expertise is required when a vicious tiger shark starts making fast food for unsuspecting swimmers. The sheriff (David Luther) insists they close the beaches, but the mayor is having none of it, as the town sailing regatta is coming up, and canceling it would destroy the town’s tourism industry. Quite unexpectedly, this has the effect of “opening up a diner for sharks”, and it’s up to the young scientist and the impoverished park keeper to get out there and show that monster who’s boss.
So just how much does Cruel Jaws rip off from regular Jaws? Well, friends, this Jaws fan has crunched the numbers, looking at footage directly stolen from the franchise, and general references, plot points, dialogue, and shot composition. Admittedly, the editing of the shark sequences is so quick and messy that a few may have slipped past me, but I counted sixty references and forty stolen shots. And that’s not to mention the copious stock footage of great whites (not tiger sharks, as this shark is meant to be) interspersed despite how jarringly different it looks from every other shot.
And you can’t even justify it by suggesting that the ripping off only occurred post-production in the editing room. There are entire plot lines, scenarios, and lines that are lifted from the Jaws movies – and even a couple from Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws that never made it to the movie, like infidelity and mafia involvement. We have town meetings with crude shark diagrams, hospital blow-ups in which the mayor is browbeaten into hiring someone to hunt the predator, and the whole general premise from Jaws. There are exploding boats, kids sneaking off behind their parents’ backs, water sports fun, a body washed up on the beach, and an opening diving sequence from Jaws 2. The shark breaks through special shark fences, a couple gets pranked while making out in the surf, an aquarium houses dolphins with dumb names, and a very over-the-top autopsy is performed on a plastic ghost train dummy, courtesy of Jaws 3. There are even a few sneaky references to Jaws the Revenge, and when that’s the movie you’re ripping off, you know you’re in trouble. Evidently, director Bruno Mattei was a visionary brimming with unique ideas, who had never even heard of that humble little film franchise titled Jaws, and to suggest otherwise would be madness!
What Makes ‘Cruel Jaws’ So Bad?
The quality of the movie is just appalling, quite frankly. The dialogue audio is at times illegible, not helped by terrible mixing levels and faint background music obviously designed to mask the low-quality sound. A few really bad day-for-night sequences, complete with telltale shadows and light reflection throw things off, especially when the scenes jump from day to night to day again, implying that a day has passed when the action suggests otherwise. Continuity is all over the damn place, with characters apparently dying, but others later saying they are still alive. And the acting… it’s just so wonderfully bad. It ranges from those who have apparently never even read out loud in their lives, to those who clearly consider themselves Shakespeare-level actors and go at it with a seriousness their talent cannot justify. There is so much unintentional humor, so many laugh-out-loud moments that this idiotic rip-off quickly becomes comedy gold.
Cruel Jaws is the jukebox musical of shark movies. It is what Moulin Rouge is to La Bohème, in that the story is a blatant retelling of one that came before it, and the meat of the movie – songs for Moulin Rouge, the shark for Cruel Jaws – are also regurgitations of someone else’s work. At least you can credit Moulin Rouge with its splendid direction, look, atmosphere, and generally transformative energy, if not originality. Cruel Jaws offers no such perks; it is just a mashup of the Jaws movies with no budget, no finesse and an incorrigibly outdated TV movie feel. You have to keep reminding yourself that it’s a product of 1995, because everything from the outfits to the characterization to the visual and audio quality is straight out of the low-budget ‘80s stock, along the lines of Miami Connection and Hobgoblins.
It’s amazing how little originality it has to offer in any sense. What footage isn’t straight-up stolen is still made up of dialogue, ideas, and tropes seen a hundred times before in much better movies. But it’s not just the shameless mimicry that gives Cruel Jaws its bite – it’s that desperate shambling element typical of old Italian export films like the delightful Troll 2. These projects were often written and directed by Italians and performed by English-speaking actors, usually with someone flailing around between them trying to bridge the gap in terms of language and culture. Understandably, this led to confusion, tensions, and scripts that were just plain stupid. Cruel Jaws actor Jay Colligan gave a great interview to Dave Jackson of Mondo Exploito that revealed a shoot that was fun but tense and marked by a hardworking bilingual assistant director, a rebelling caterer, and a pissed-off director who couldn’t communicate his vision to his American actors. The fact that they had no shark to work with didn’t strike the actor as a problem, as he’d “heard they’d bought some underwater footage”. Evidently, they didn’t mention the daylight robbery of other footage from pre-existing movies.
‘Jaws’ Isn’t the Only Movie ‘Cruel Jaws’ Rips Off
In a strange turn of events, Cruel Jaws is not just a rip-off, but a double-distilled rip-off. The 1981 Italian film Great White (AKA The Last Shark) was such a shameless and direct retelling of Jaws that it faced accusations of plagiarism from Universal which resulted in it being pulled from the US market, as Sharksploitation explains. While it was a stupid, cheap, and not terribly exciting movie, it at least had the decency to shoot its own footage and build its own shark, no matter how laughably fake it looked. So to fill in the gaps between stolen Jaws footage, Cruel Jaws also throws in footage stolen from Great White, to the extent that Mattei made a shark movie without ever shooting a single frame of shark footage himself. An impressive feat if professional integrity isn’t really your thing. So what Mattei actually ended up contributing to this fusion buffet of sharky goodness was the cheesy human action that thrashes violently between campy ‘80s clichés and dialogue from Jaws changed so little that it could have resulted from a game of Chinese Whispers – and boy is that contribution bad!
Bruno Mattei had been editing films since the ‘50s and directing since the ‘70s, but that is not to say that he learned from all his experience. By the time of Cruel Jaws, he had been in the game for almost forty years and apparently hadn’t even got a handle on the basics like continuity or simple editing. How nice it must be to sustain a decades-long career in a famously demanding and competitive industry while turning out such low-quality work; the rest of his filmography doesn’t fare much better, frequently involving glaringly derivative projects that exploited whatever film trends were popular at the time. But to his credit, his low-effort approach to movie-making has sustained something of a fanbase.
‘Cruel Jaws’ Got Into Legal Trouble
Having been made for TV, Cruel Jaws somehow made it past the legal department on its first go-round, perhaps owing to Mattei’s well-established reputation for rip-offs. According to Dave Jackson, it managed some foreign VHS distribution and even snuck out into circulation on DVD in 2009, courtesy of one of those cheap little distribution houses whose stuff you find in dollar store bins. But then some bright spark came along with the intention of doing things legitimately and attracted the wrong kind of attention. Scream Factory ended up canceling their Blu-Ray release of Cruel Jaws on account of its heavy use of footage stolen from Jaws and Great White. Things struggled behind the scenes for some time, with little to no update or even gossip as to what the movie’s fate might be. But just when people needed cheering up within the confines of their homes, the movie finally secured a mid-pandemic release courtesy of Severin Films. Although no real explanation was offered, it would seem that whatever issues tanked the SF release had been resolved, and this stupid movie could finally be enjoyed by the bad movie-loving masses.
Ultimately, Cruel Jaws is not the kind of rip-off that you can stay mad at, because it wasn’t impactful or successful enough to outshine its predecessor. There isn’t a soul out there watching this who hasn’t heard of Chief Brody or Amity Island. Despite being a product of sneak thievery, it is a cute, silly little movie that has the feeling of a kid clopping around in their parents’ huge shoes. Its naïveté and under-ambition is kind of endearing and makes for a very amusing watch. Bruno Mattei may not have been a great auteur, but he sure knew how to turn out a movie that was so bad it was good, even if that wasn’t his intention.
