(1995)
1
Jeremy Wheeler
Of all the Jaws clones out there, Cruel Jaws takes the cake for being the granddaddy of all rip-offs. The title, in fact, says it all. The movie is cruel, but only to its audience. If the wretched dubbing doesn't put one into severe shock, then the slapdash editing and incessant carnival music score will. As far as copping Spielberg's classic goes, there is nothing that compares to Cruel Jaws -- nothing! Full chunks of exact to near-exact dialogue are flagrantly lifted, with small visual clips from all three initial movies thrown in here and there for good measure. Schlock-maestro director Bruno Mattei even one-ups his own countrymen by ripping off their own rip-offs, most notably Joe D'Amato's Deep Blood and Enzo Castellari's The Last Shark (which is, in and of itself, the most notorious Jaws wannabe on the block thanks to a Universal legal injunction that has barred the flick's U.S. release to this day). With huge chunks of Enzo's movie padding out Mattei's footage, it's incredible that the film hasn't spawned a "spot that shot" drinking game for those savvy enough to recognize its many magical movie cuts. If all of that weren't crazy enough, the flick is full of out-of-nowhere dialogue that'll wear out viewers' rewind buttons as they try to clarify that, yes, those characters did just say what they think they did (many lines of which are far too expletive to repeat here). Add in a paraplegic little brat, a Hulk Hogan main character lookalike, and a gut-busting reenacted scene from Jaws 2 featuring a bimbo, a gas can, and an exploding boat, and that's Cruel Jaws in an exhausting nutshell. It might not make a lick of sense a lot of the time, but it's the epitome of outrageous thievery cinema -- best served with a chilled brew and approached with a heart open to hilarious B-movie madness.
Cruel Jaws on AllMovie
Cruel Jaws (1995)
