Great White (1981)

Director: Enzo Castellari

Starring: James Franciscus, Vic Morrow, Joshua Sinclair

More Info: IMDB

Tagline: A quiet, restful summer in the lazy coastal town of Port Harbor is abruptly about to end.

Plot: An enormous and angry 35 foot Great White Shark takes revenge on humans when they build a beach just for swimmers by a coastal town. After several shark attacks, and the Mayor does nothing to stop it, James Franisscus and Vic Morrow sail in pursuit to stop it.

My Rating: 5.5

Would I watch it again? Once was plenty.

#2 on Dusk to Dawn Drive-In Trash-o-Rama Show Vol. 1 (part of the TRAILER TRASH PROJECT)

There's something about great movies and their subsequent knockoffs that fascinate me. Maybe it's the hope that the knockoff will come close to being a great, fun movie like its originator. JAWS (1975) is one of the all-time greats and there will never likely be another as good.


PIRAHNA (1978) is easily the best of the JAWS clones I've seen. Sure, it's blatant in its inspiration but it's also a helluva good time. It doesn't take itself too seriously and it's low budget is stretched more than Heidi Fleiss's meat curtains. GREAT WHITE takes a simpler, less creative approach in that it's just saying, "Hey, remember Jaws? We saw it, too!"

Soooo we're gonna put up a shark fence...HERE!

There's nothing really special here because everything it's attempting was done better in JAWS. Morrow's got the unenviable role of playing Robert Shaw's counterpart. Shaw was Welsh and Morrow is Scottish (although his accent wanders all over the place). They're both shark hunters and they both die by the shark. OK, I will give GREAT WHITE a huge round of applause for Morrow's death scene. Well, it's not his death scene so much as it's his contribution to the shark's death scene. That was pretty fucking cool. More on that later.




Considering what it is, it's quite a well-made film, technically speaking, of course. If you're a fan of director Castellari like me (INGLORIOUS BASTARDS (1978) and a string of good spaghetti westerns and exploitation films in the 60s, 70s and 80s), you'll definitely want to check this one out.

Vote for me 'cause I used to be a 70s porn star!

Same story as JAWS. Shark terrorizes a coastal town, local politician doesn't heed the warnings and lots of people die. They both have mechanical sharks (and this one didn't look that bad, surprisingly). But JAWS didn't have underwater shots like this:

"One thing's for sure, it wasn't a floatin' chainsaw."

After the Mayor fucks up by thinking they can protect the race contestants with a shark-proof fence and snipers on the ready...

He pulls the biggest WTF moment out the picture and goes after the shark with a helicopter! Trolling a large chunk of meat on a hook, Mayor McStupid thinks he can catch it. Sheer brilliance. Here's how it turns out for the Darwin Award Honorary Inductee:













TONS of stock shark footage of varying quality and of different breeds of shark that are supposed to be the same one.

So Morrow dies earlier by getting caught up in a cable that the shark is also tangled in. When the shark takes off, so does Morrow which eventually kills him. Now Morrow had an explosives belt around his waist with a detonator. After he's been long gone he shows up (still dead) when Benton (James Franciscus) could really use some help, stranded on this floating pier debris. Benton watches as the shark devours his already dead buddy, screams, "DAMN YOU!", dives very stylishly into the water and presses the detonator which, in affect, blows up the rubber shark.









I'd be likely to give it a better score but that the film makers didn't give a shit about ripping off many scenes and situations from the first two JAWS films, I can't really do that. They really tried to make a serious shark attack movie hoping that audiences will have either forgotten the original or remembered it and thought it would be just as good. What makes it worse is that GREAT WHITE came 6 years after JAWS!!! I'm betting they were hoping audiences had forgotten. I'll bet further still that they were wanting to forget this one. They got their chance because Universal successfully sued to have this pulled from theaters days after its release.