No kidding buddy, but you’re gonna need a lot more than an allusion to your inadequate penis size to fix this movie.

Before his recent death, Bruno Mattei was infamous for two things: ripping off popular movies and using pseudonyms every time he would do so. Whether for legal reasons or out of personal shame, the man stuck by this formula for bad movies success and somehow it worked… badly, mind you, but it worked nonetheless. That tried and true method plays out yet again for this, the man’s 39th directorial feature, done under the alias of “William Snyder”. If you’re wondering which pop culture keystone the man took his unholy Xerox machine to this time, here’s a hint: drop the first word of the title.

That’s right; yet again we have an Italian knock-off of the Steven Spielberg giant shark adaptation. Ironically enough, Mattei wasn’t contented with simply lifting his movie from the American pinnacle of killer fish flicks, but also bites heavily from the purloined great white hopes of fellow countrymen Enzo “The Last Shark” Castellari and Joe “Deep Blood” D’Amato too! Now, in all honesty (and possibly speaking in a legal sense too), can you really consider the theft of property that’s already stolen to be a theft in and of itself? While you ponder the moral ambiguity of that, let’s delve into the made-for-TV malarkey that is Cruel Jaws.

Our tale takes place in the small coastal town of Hampton Bay. The summer beach season is getting underway and that means big tourist type cash for the local businesses and three long months of headaches and out-of-towner idiocy for the poor local residents who live there year round. Welcome to my nightmare as a guy who works in Manhattan and rides the subway everyday. I think the popular spelling of “tourist” should be changed to t-a-r-g-e-t, but that’s just me. Anyway, spending the summer in Hampton Bay are marine biologist Billy and his girlfriend Vanessa (who feels she needs to grow gills if she wants his attention) who are staying with their buddy Dag, his son Bob and his wheelchair bound little girl Suzy… whose legs seem to have little trouble working when she’s keeping afloat in water or being picked up. Dag is a Nordic ex-whale fisherman who has since retired to spend more time with his family, growing a Hulk Hogan mustache and opening a bargain basement Sea World of his very own that consists of a pool, a couple of dolphins and a seal. Not the Charlie Sheen type, the sea mammal one.

As for Bob, he’s playing out a Romeo & Juliet type sidestory of his own, dating a rich girl named Gloria who just so happens to be the daughter of Samuel Lewis, Hampton Bay’s premiere landowner and resident slimeball businessman in bed with the Mafia. Mr. Lewis is unhappy that his daughter is not only fraternizing with a lame-o named “Bob”, but, surprise surprise, Lewis also owns the property on which Dag’s dime store aquatic show stands… or swims. Anyway, Mr. L wants to sell the land to a wealth mob contingent so they can build a hotel there and coincidentally enough the Dagburger’s behind on his rent. Now he needs to come up with a big ol’ chunk of change to keep the park open and give his goofy looking cripple girl a place where she can be dragged around by dolphins daily. In a very One Crazy Summer type of twist, it seems that Lewis is sponsoring the annual Hampton Bay Regatta, in which Bob hopes to enter and win so Dag can use the prize money to keep the park open! I know, I know, you’re wondering where the shark comes in. Trust me, I’ll get to that in a minute…

Also entering the Regatta this year is Sammy’s son Ronnie, whom he uses for all of his evil schemes, like beating up Bob to keep him away from Gloria and trying to kill Dag’s dolphins with mackerel stuffed with rat poison, an old bayou delicacy. Ronnie is by far the movie’s most amusingly over-the-top presence as his “big beach bully” mentality is only heightened by the fact that he shouts everything incoherently through gritted teeth, as if the actor’s jaw had been wired shut prior to filming and this was the only way to get around it! Anyway, Ronnie and his immoral family legacy are entering the Regatta too, so you can imagine where things go between him and Bob… though I’m sure you can’t imagine how hilarious it is to watch it play out, as the two actors stand on their windsailing boards on dry land while the extent of Mattei’s “illusion” consists of shooting the boys from the stomach up in an effort to make it look like they’re actually windsurfing and not just standing on dry land... again, Ronnie’s insistence on shouting through his gritted teeth supplement the scene’s already present cheddar factor nicely.

Okay, enough with the 90210 drama crap, let’s get down to the true star of this movie: the shark. The shark’s presence is felt from the beginning, as two salvage divers and the drunken sailor they hired to boat them around opening the movie by trying to salvage a wrecked US Navy vessel in the hopes of selling whatever was on board and making a mint. You’d think that if the cargo on board was so damned valuable then the Navy would have salvaged it themselves by now, but that’s logical and logic plays no part in a Bruno Mattei movie… or many Italian movies period. As you can imagine, a man-eating tiger shark has made the wreckage his home and proceeds to consume both divers as well as the intoxicated captain… who’s later revealed to be Cuban, while I thought he was just an old white guy sucking down rum. One of the diver’s remains washes up on the Hampton Bay beach and Francis, the local sheriff and resident Patrick Duffy impersonator, is called in to investigate. Thanks to Billy’s confirmation, the man’s death is ruled to have been a shark attack and the sheriff immediately wants to close down the beach and cancel the Regatta for obvious safety reasons. Mr. Lewis convinces the Hampton Bay mayor otherwise and, in the interest of the local businesses who would be devastated by the closing of the beach (including one Samuel Lewis of course…), the mayor decrees that the corpse is to be chalked up to a boat propeller accident and the beach is to remain open to the public… a concept that never turns out well for anyone who opts to go skinny dipping for the rest of the movie.

Sure enough one young couple attempts just that soon after. The girl is killed and her boyfriend goes to the police ranting about the attack, only to be covered up again by the mayor who says that the boy is obviously drunk and delirious. Meanwhile, Billy is working with the sheriff to determine exactly what it is they’re really dealing with (including an unintentionally hilarious scene where the sheriff hops over a handrail and Billy looks at a slide show of shark pictures while an intense, action oriented street hip-hop beat plays over the entire thing!). Nerd boy’s focus on trying to prevent more people from dying annoys Vanessa enough that she decides to go to a party with her friend Glenda, who happens to be dating a guy named Tommy, who happens to be Ronnie Lewis’s best friend, who happens to be trolling for easy tail. And so, the desperate for attention Vanessa goes for an after dark swim with Mr. Preppie Rich Boy and… nothing happens. Before the giant shark can somehow come within 20ft of the shore and maul the cavorting twenty-somethings, Tommy and Glenda show up to spoil their fun and the two simply leave the water. We don’t even see any kind of relationship fallout between Billy and Vanessa afterwards, so for the 486th time in my life of watching movies, I’m forced to ask the eternal question; “What the fuck did that scene have to do with anything?!”.

Okay, so now the Regatta happens. Ronnie pushes Bob into “the water” and causes him to lose (I guess there aren’t any judges making sure this doesn’t turn into Thunderdome on sailboards?) and, despite Sam Lewis’s promise that a special shark net he had installed around the perimeter of the event to keep everybody safe, the remorseless eating machine tears its way into the populated area and proceeds to take out the tourists and sailboarders buffet style. Several characters run around the beach and docks with little megaphones shouting “GET OUT OF THE WATER!” for five minutes while everybody either panics or is eaten, including a small crowd of people who, despite having several people screaming “GET OUT OF THE WATER!” to them incessantly, opt to stand around on a dock while it’s eaten out from under them… much like they themselves are eaten in the same fashion. In all of the chaos, Suzy’s wheelchair is seemingly possessed by a poltergeist as it’s sent barreling through the crowd of people for no real reason, dumping the little gimp into the water. Vanessa leaps in to get her to safety, only to become an hors d'oeuvre herself when Billy’s unable to make more than the weakest possible effort to reach in and pull her back out himself. Way to go geek-o, that’s what you get for working your brain muscles instead of your arm muscles… and for dating a woman who can’t pull herself up the side of a dock… and wears those hideously high thongs around her stomach… uggh, forget it, she’s better off to everybody as shark chow anyway.

Mr. Lewis is pushed into offering a reward for 100 large to whomever can bring in the monster. Ronnie tries to do so with his dad’s yacht and his friend’s shotgun, resulting in the funniest scene of the entire movie, which I’ll elaborate on later. The town prick and his pals all die comically. Sheriff Francis opts for a method that you would think to be much smarter than all of these gung-ho half-baked Quint wanna-bes and tries to take the beast out via helicopter. It’s sound logic at first, but the he goes and ‘tards it all up when he drops a giant fishhook into the water with a slab of meat attached. The shark rises from the ocean and grabs the bait, so the sheriff’s imbalanced helicopter is now attached to a giant shark by a length of high tensile steel cable… this, of course, ends badly for Sheriff Francis. Goodbye sir, I only wish we could have seen your Patrick Duffy stage impersonation act before you left us. To add more fodder to the death toll, we’re also introduced to Mr. Lewis’s mafia business partners who find out about the Navy wreckage thanks to an incredibly vague map made by Billy that shows a section of ocean with a big red arrow pointing to a circle that says “IT’S HERE”. The mamelukes think that they’ll have a better time of salvaging its valuable mystery cargo than our duo of unfortunate get-rich-quicksters from the beginning. I’ll give you three guesses about how well this goes and the first two don’t count. This scene is important for one reason: as one of the goons is being dragged underwater by the shark’s gaping maw (that seems to suffer from a case of lockjaw as it refuses to close), a burst of air bubbles in the water as the corpse farts it’s final goodbye… or maybe it was just the shark himself farting… If you don’t believe me, watch the movie.

Okay, home stretch: our heroes discover the truth behind the super tiger shark. It seems that the monster guppy was created and trained by the Navy to be the ultimate aquatic bio-weapon… in case the US ever has to invade Atlantis for suspected links to Al-Queda. Dag, Billy, Bob and their buddy Larry line the shark’s sunken ship lair with dynamite, narrowly avoid it’s hungry teeth and blow the living crap out of the thing (it looks like the special effects team detonates a cherry bomb inside of a toy shark…). Dag gets the reward money, his water park will stay open (at least until Sea World sues his mustache off) and Sam Lewis, despite having lost his only son and all public support, is targeted for one final pratfall as he’s pushed into a pool by Dag’s pet seal… for the second time of the movie. Komedy! Yay! It’s over!

If you’ve never subjected yourself to a Mattei movie before, you’re either in for the time of your life or a tragic misuse of 90 minutes of your life. Every project is so broke-ass that you’d mistake most of them for student films. Each movie seems to break dance through a surreal fantasy world that invokes images of parody and outright theft. It’s obvious that much of this movie’s ideas were stolen from the movies mentioned much earlier in the review. I popped in my copy of The Last Shark the other day and, despite using different actors, I could almost swear I was skimming through the exact same movie, sailboarders and all. In fact, I’m pretty sure that much of the “happy people enjoying the beach” stock footage was even lifted straight from that movie’s reels! Whether ol’ Bruno/William was intentionally robbing these movies or not is unsure, but George Lucas and John Williams should definitely send their lawyers over to Mattei’s estate and try to squeeze out a few Euros given that the theme from Star Wars leads us through several scenes!

If you’re getting a good laugh out of all of this, then fasten your seatbelt ladles and Germans because you’re about to get showered by comedy gold… ewww. One thing that’s also good for a number of interspersing chuckles is the odd affinity that several of the movie’s male characters seem to have for wanting to relieve other men of their testicles. Three different times from three different men are the intentions for ripping off another man’s balls thrown out there in different variations, the funniest one of which includes wanting to turn a pair into earrings that only Red Sonja would wear. Another point of rib tickling contention is that you don’t need to be a marine biologist to know the difference between a tiger shark and, well, the hours of stock footage being shown here are for great whites. This is the thing that boggles my ever lovin’ deviant mind: if you’re gonna go ahead and steal all of your shark footage from the Jaws movies and a select few other bad Italian shark flicks, then why not go all the way and just say that the killer shark in question is a great white rather than trying to be different and saying that it’s a tiger shark? Well, with Mattei now gone I guess we’ll never know… well, I will, as I have his sitting right here watching me type this, but you’ll never know and that’s what’s important.

There’s one final scene that makes every minute of this aquatic torture-fest all worth while, but before that I just want to get the last bit of my opinions out of the way so we all know exactly where I stand on the topic of Cruel Jaws. It’s no doubt that this movie is hard to watch at times. You can’t sit through all of the stock footage and overdone radioactive cornball taco supreme power acting of the cast without maybe grimacing or whimpering a few times. Normally I’d cut down something like this with the might of Paul Bunyan making toothpicks out of a giant redwood, but I had such a good time watching it that I can’t bring myself to whip out my big blue ox and bury it under a shitstorm. Even in the shrieking face of a banshee made of horrible audio technology that makes some people sound like they’re mumbling incoherently while others scream like radio interference being bounced off the walls of an empty room, and a lightning budget that was spent on a keg for the after party and a blue filter so they could shoot their “night scenes” during the day, well, I can’t bring myself to drop the guillotine. For all it’s technical ineptitude and rampant movie clip thievery, I’d normally give it a big fat goose egg, but the unintentional hilarity, the appearance of Hulk Hogan’s smaller figured Viking cousin, and the nigh Ed Wood level of “you know they suck but at least they’re trying” sympathy made me knock it up a couple of levels from total condemnation. Congrats Mr. Mattei, you made me feel sorry for you and your crew. Now, for the ultimate pay-off: the funniest scene you’ll ever see in a movie about people being attacked by a clip show of better movies.

When Ronnie and his pals head out on Daddy’s yacht to hunt the killer shark, said friends attempt to bait the hungry stock footage with a slab of meat on a pole as the Ronster fires at it with a shotgun. The shark’s thrashing causes the pole to trip up Ronnie and knock him into the water, where he’s quickly devoured whole by more quick cuts between footage of himself thrashing in the water and more shark footage. Ronnie’s presence amidst his friends must have caused some kind of dampening field that suppressed the group’s raging inner madness though, because mere seconds after he’s gone the three all go completely and utterly bat shit crazy! Glenda grabs a nearby gas can and starts screaming like Whitney Houston after a pipe full of rock, the look of unadulterated insanity ticking in her eyes as she pours the gasoline all over herself and the deck of the boat! While she’s freaking out as if Ronnie’s demise ignited a thousand menstrual cycles in her body at once, Ron’s poor idiot sidekick Tommy runs into the picture wielding a flare gun with only the best of intentions. Before you can say “Ninety-six people die in freak club fire during Great White concert in Rhode Island” (yeah, I know, I didn’t think there were still ninety-six people in the world willing to see a Great White performance either… nor that they all apparently lived in Rhode Island), the yacht explodes Jaws 2 style (because it’s a boat explosion shot taken directly from that movie…) and everybody dies! It’s probably the funniest thing I’ll see for months and I’ll probably laugh at the most inopportune times just thinking about the look on Glenda’s face. And how ironic that I just made a Great White joke in a movie about a killer tiger shark… that’s really a murderous collection of clips about various great white sharks. Completely unintentional, I assure you, as I was almost positive it was Whitesnake that killed the last few fans they had until my fiancée pointed out my mistake. Go figure. Or, better yet, just go away! Cheers!