Mako - Jaws Of Death

Fin N’ Tonic

Mako -
Jaws Of Death
USA 1976
Directed by William Grefé  
Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Silly spoilers swimming under the surface of this review.

Well now, I can see how some people are going to be pretty underwhelmed by Mako - Jaws Of Death (as it’s titled on the actual print... as opposed to absolutely any other title listing for the film) but, you know, I kinda quite liked it and think it’s quite entertaining in a low key kinda way. This is the sixth film in Arrow’s incredible He Came From The Swamp - The William Grefé Collection Blu Ray boxed edition and, although the print isn’t in great condition (like a lot of these films included... barely saved from vinegar syndrome before it was too late), it does still retain its widescreen aspect ratio. This is the movie that Grefé worked on trying to get funding for years before and nobody was interested. Then a little movie called Jaws caused a bit of a bloody splash in 1975 and suddenly, everyone wanted their own shark picture. So although this is not actually a Jaws bandwagon movie... and the story certainly reflects that... it probably wouldn’t have been made without the success of Spielberg’s magnum opus.

Richard Jaeckel plays Sonny Stein, the main protagonist/antagonist, depending on your point of view. The film starts off strongly with a wonderful pre-credits sequence where three men on a boat are shark fishing. One of them has one on his line... then a frogman, Jaeckel, swims up to the shark and cuts it loose. He then boards the boat and cuts a swathe of bloody vengeance through the three fishermen, feeding them all to his sharky friends.

Okay, so the film tells Sonny’s story and pictures him as a kind of recluse... but he’s well known in Florida, where the movie is set, as being an expert on sharks. Everyone comes to this lonely man to fulfil their shark needs. He’s not that willing to help but he is pressured into it. He is conned into signing over one of his sharks to a sideshow act in a local bar and a scientific researcher wants him to ‘loan’ them his pregnant shark friend for ‘observation’. Yeah, you can kinda see what’s coming. One of the ‘bad guys’ is Harold ‘Odd Job’ Sakata (of Goldfinger fame) as another ‘shark worrier’... he seems to be turning up in a few things I’ve watched recently.

At some point in the film we get to hear Sonny’s back story... which is this. In the war, in the Philippines, he was trying to escape from some bad guys. At some point he has to make a choice between staying on dry land and getting shot or jumping into the local shark infested waters and possibly being eaten alive. So of course, he chooses the latter (just, why?) but the sharks don’t eat him... instead they eat the two guys chasing him. A local shaman... who is a ‘shark shaman’ sitting on his shark throne and who hangs with an unseen tribe of shark worshippers... witnesses what has happened and is impressed. He gives Sonny a big shark medallion and tells him that, whenever he is wearing the medallion, he is a friend of the sharks and they will talk to him. So, yeah, that’s why all of Sonny’s best mates have fins and impressive pearly whites, I guess.

Anyway, things come to a head and, when Sonny finds out that the guy who owns the bar is torturing the shark with sound waves to make it seem more threatening in the tank... and also that the ‘scientists’ have killed the pregnant shark and all the babies, well... he goes on a roaring rampage of revenge, killing all the nasty humans who are being unkind to sharks.

And it was okay... I found it entertaining. It really makes no references to Jaws and even the music is, almost always, completely unlike the iconic John Williams score for Spielberg’s picture. According to the IMDB, the score is by two composers, William Loose and Paul Ruhland but, it never really seems like it was scored to work together or even with the images, to be honest. It sounds more like needle drop to me and I wonder if these composers actually did work with Grefé on this movie or whether he just took existing music by both of them and dropped it into his film.

Jaeckel cut his head open on one day of shooting (the same day the camera was accidentally destroyed and the boat needed for the shoot hit a sand bank)... but he was apparently stitched up at the local hospital and back on the set in no time. I don’t know if this explains why, in some of the ‘swimming with Mako sharks’ shots, he has a big stuntman standing in for him... a stuntman who’s desperately trying to obscure his unfamiliar face from the camera by hiding it behind the shark’s fin. It looks pretty funny, it has to be said.

Not too much more to be said about Mako - Jaws Of Death really. It’s not particularly well put together in terms of the way the frames are designed or anything but it’s a more than competently sewn up movie experience (there are many movies out there by directors where you couldn’t say the same thing), it’s fairly fast paced, it’s entertaining and shark whisperer Jaeckel gives a real good, mean and pyschotic stare when required. Not a bad movie but, like I said, a lot of people are probably not going to give it much time. I liked it though and, yes, I’d watch it again.

Grizzly

Truth Or Bear

Grizzly
USA 1976
Directed by William Girdler
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

“...another contemporary American
phenomenon that’s truly moronic.”

That’s how Woody Allen described the authorised novelizations of movies in his phenomenal film Manhattan and, I have to say, I’d pretty much agree with that. I grew up reading the 'above average' novelisations of old Doctor Who stories and, of course, when the ghost written novelisation of Star Wars came out, with its 8 pages of full colour photos in the centre, I was bitten by the bug the same as everyone else. It didn’t take me more than about six years to realise just how stupid that idea was, though. I mean, I guess they’re still technically literature but... I don’t know, I certainly give them a wide berth these days.

That being said, I used to thrive on tomes acquired ‘on the cheap’ from second hand bookshelves back in the 1970s (and 1980s for that matter) and one of those novelisations I acquired was the adaptation of Grizzly by Will Collins. I’d never seen the film as the rating would have been too high for me at that age (I would have been about 8 years old) but I do remember thinking to myself, even then, that this movie had obviously been made as a bandwagon attempt to cash in on the previous year’s Jaws (which is also a movie I’d not been old enough to see at the time... although I did have a rubber shark in my toy box).

The reason I mention this novelisation now is because, like a lot of those things either written from an early script before the film was completed (look at the Marvel comic strip adaptation of Star Wars the year it came out if you want to see all the stuff that was cut out of that movie, as an example), it never really matched the film completely and sometimes you’d find something interesting going on. Of course, only if you’d seen the movie and... well I hadn’t. The reason this one sticks in my mind fondly, however, is because it’s the first time I’d been made aware, via a blonde ‘model’ character in the book, that a woman’s pubic hair would naturally match the hair colour on the rest of her body. Of course, that makes perfect sense but... it’s not something I’d ever thought of before so... something of a quirky and somewhat sexy memory from my childhood, I guess.

Now that I finally come to watch the movie on a relatively new Blu Ray release from 88 Films, I have to say I am somewhat disappointed that this scene is nowhere to be found in the movie. Instead, we have a scene where a lady park ranger (the film is set in a state park with lots of forest and campers) takes a shower in a natural waterfall and gets gored up by the title creature. In her underwear. Because, if you take the time to strip off and go and walk under a waterfall, you’re certainly going to leave your bra and knickers on to get wet aren’t you? Well apparently so. This movie follows a 1970s aesthetic where female nudity should be kept off screen but it’s okay to see people’s limbs flying off in various directions... not to mention a horse's head in one memorable moment during the running time.

This film is... not good. Looking at it now for the first time, in a truly excellent widescreen transfer, I have to wonder why it was the top grossing independent film of the year... a status it kept for two years. I guess the answer was it was based on Jaws, to a certain extent and is hitting similar ‘moments’ that the far superior Spielberg movie delivered in a much more stylish package.

The film is full of people you recognise but don’t know, too. Sure there are character actors and there are even less famous character actors and what we have here, I think, are specimens of the latter. People like Christopher George, Andrew Prine and Richard Jaeckel are on hand to track down and attempt to kill the nefarious, giant sized grizzly bear of the title. Joan McCall is the love interest but she’s not in it much and, after the sexist Christopher George tells her character she can’t come on the hunt with him and his rangers, she dutifully sits the rest of the movie out from about the half way mark. Which is really strange, I thought.

The film starts off with Andrew Prine driving his helicopter around and explaining to some officials about the park/nature reserve for the benefit of the audience. We then follow the helicopter in a montage through the opening credits and the audience is immediately hit with Robert O. Ragland’s nauseatingly syrupy main theme as we see... just way to many shots and angles of a helicopter flying, after a static shot with extra camera jitter which no transfer is going to be able to correct. The music isn’t bad all the way through the movie, with some Jaws inspired rhythms, dissonance and synthesiser work... but it does get quite terrible whenever melody comes up. We then have Christopher George briefing his men in what could be the most short and redundant briefing ever committed to a movie. I mean, why gather up all your men if you’re just going to say the equivalent of “Be careful out there.”?

And then it becomes a 'by the numbers' Jaws remake but with no sea and with some terrible writing and acting on hand a lot of the time. The various gory demises, mostly of good looking women, are clumsily done and all in the edit because, as you might expect, the bear they had on hand was going to be going nowhere near the rest of the cast and crew other than its handler. So all the shots of the actual bear in no way match up to the sequences they are edited into... for example, you might see a clumsy ‘man in suit’ close up of a fake bear arm or snout coming into shot, followed by a gruesome picture of gory aftermath and... a cut back to the immaculately coiffured bear who has absolutely no traces of blood on him at all. Crazy stuff. So the waterfall scene I talked about earlier, is literally a shot of the arm reaching from within the waterfall followed by a shot of the water turning red to emphasise how horrible it must all be if you ever find yourself being attacked by a furry arm. Indeed, the second victim of the movie even has her screams looped on a repeat on the soundtrack for a good while in a move to emphasise the sheer non-shock of what you might have just seen while also... well, who knows? Maybe it’s trying to sound like an echo... one of those echoes that never fade and just sound like a bad sound sample repeated over and over.

There’s a lot of silly things on offer in this movie, to be honest and, if I was being just a little more charitable, I might say it belongs in the ‘so bad it’s good’ camp and... I’m not sure it isn’t.

After all, this is the film where I learned that the main occupation of people who go camping is to run along in single file, frolicking at high speed while wearing their heavy back packs. I mean... what the heck is going on here? This can’t be accurate. Is this what campers do? I think not.

There is a nice moment when, upon hearing the bear expert’s report that it must be a giant grizzly that’s doing the killing (in place of Richard Dreyfuss’ shark expert in Jaws), the head of the park (who refuses to close the park, just like the mayor in Jaws) says that the expert is talking about science fiction. About the only witty piece of dialogue writing in the whole movie occurs when Richard Jaeckel replies... “Science, yeah! Fiction, no.” He is, presumably, paraphrasing Bela Lugosi in the 1934 Universal version of The Black Cat where he famously replies to the accusation of “supernatural baloney” with... “Supernatural perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not.” This was a really nice touch, it has to be said.

Other than that, though, this phenomenally successful independent movie, somehow comes off as a low budget TV movie at best, in my view. Complete with gory violence, bad editing, mismatching bear shots and a lot of point of view work from what I can only describe as a perpetually growly bear cam substitute. I wouldn’t, in all honesty, recommend Grizzly to anybody but I am kinda glad I saw it and I can see how it would be a good film to slip into a drunken, all night movie session with friends... so a feeling of community spirit can be achieved by everyone having something silly to mock. So, yeah, it might be true to say it’s a grisly movie in terms of what it does to drain the stamina from its audience, as much as it is a grizzly one.