SEVEN TOTALLY BONKERS JAWS RIP-OFFS
How Jaws traveled the world one infringement at a time
“Is there anything to say about Jaws that you haven't already said?”
That’s the opening question of the documentary Jaws @ 50, Laurent Bouzereau’s worthwhile look back at Steven Spielberg’s defining film. (Which was also the sorest point of our controversial Gen X and Millennial quiz.)
One of the things most often said about Jaws—and not usually as a compliment—is that it was the birth of the summer blockbuster. The anxiety expressed through that factoid is that Jaws’ success was the moment B material could marry an A film budget. What The Exorcist had started, Jaws completed, leading to Alien and then the wholesale postmodern raiding of pulp culture through the 1980s and ’90s .
Of course, none of the below filmmakers had anything as remotely complex on their minds when they made their respective Jaws rip-offs. But the list shows how a successful story can be remade the world over, with unique local alterations, allowing the movies to achieve their own kind of stolen grace, like photocopies of photocopies.
Grizzly (1976)
Grizzly’s story of a park ranger versus a rogue bear set the template for all Jaws rip-offs to follow. A concerned fill in the blank teams up with an eccentric fill in the blank, plus a fill in the blank with a dark connection to the animal. They all take on the indifferent civic leaders choosing tourism over safety. There’s a fair amount of ridiculous exploitation to Grizzly—a female ranger stops to take a nude waterfall bath in the middle of a search party—but the scene of Richard Jaeckel waking up from his bear-dug shallow grave only to be eaten again is still nightmare fuel. Director William Girdler’s film from the following year, Day of the Animals, is an even more deranged take, asking the question: what if every animal, and Leslie Nielsen, started attacking you?
Tentacles (1977)
As I sadly learned first watching this on Detroit’s WKBD 50, Tentacles is a bit soggy. This despite the promise of a giant octopus terrorizing a cast of check-cashing day players including Henry Fonda, John Huston, and Shelley Winters. That said, Bo Hopkins’ scarily committed performance as a grieving widower using his trained orcas to hunt down the monster octopus who killed his wife is worth waiting for. If that sentence just sounded a little strange, remember that director Ovidio G. Assonitis would later go on to make the Citizen Kane of WTF films, The Visitor.
Orca (1977)
With a cast of Richard Harris and Charlotte Rampling, music by Ennio Morricone, and script by Robert Towne, Orca was the first truly big budget Jaws rip-off but also— ironically—an example of the 1970s bummer film Jaws was meant to have vanquished. What traumatized child could ever forget the scene of the stillborn calf of the titular orca being hosed off the deck by Harris? Bo Derek having her leg bitten off as revenge? Or the late era Pierre Trudeau malaise this filmed-in-Canada movie seems to have soaked up? Orca is Beachcombers meets Blackfish over a bong of sadness.
Piranha (1978)
Now known mostly as both Joe Dante’s first full directing credit and John Sayles’ first filmed script, Piranha isn’t quite as fun as you remember it being. And it’s a lot more low-budget. (Producer Roger Corman cut $200,000 out of the budget a week before shooting.) Still, the attack scene on the campers remains jarring, and Spielberg was enough of a fan that he hired Dante to direct Gremlins. When later working on The Howling together, Dante visited Sayles in his East Village apartment and was surprised to see he had a typewriter set up for every one of the multiple scripts he was working on, including The Howling, Return of the Secaucus 7, and ...
Alligator (1980)
Jaws meets Saul Alinsky! As far as John Sayles’ monster era goes Alligator is leagues better than Piranha. (But not quite as good as The Howling.) After all, it stars Medium Cool’s patron saint Robert Forster as a Chicago cop tracking down a mutant sewer alligator amid local corruption. The fat cat wedding attack is still a peak of socialist screen fantasy violence and Alligator remains the most character-driven film about a giant animal on a rampage you’ll ever see.
Razorback (1984)
Pitched as “Jaws on trotters” the Australian contribution to the genre is far better than it needs to be thanks to director Russell Mulcahy. The Australian native had returned to make Razorback after spending the first part of the 1980s creating iconic music videos for Duran Duran. He brought with him tricks, filters, style to spare, and the right attitude: if you’re hired to make a movie about a monster wild boar terrorizing the Outback then you should make the best goddamn monster wild boar film ever. There are psychedelic walkabouts, Mad Max bogans, and the best hunter line in any Jaws rip-off. “He’s just bacon!”
Amsterdamned (1988)
Next to Razorback this is my favorite Jaws rip-off because there is no animal in it. After nearly 15 years of rip-offs by that point, why bother with one? Rather, this is an Amsterdam-set slasher film with a killer who stalks the city’s canals in a scuba suit. Yes, it recreates some iconic scenes from Jaws, but the film is also its own very Dutch and weird thing, directed and scored by the exquisitely named Dick Maas. In Amsterdamned, Huub Stapel investigates the water-based murders, strutting like a Dutch Sylvester Stallone. He has bizarrely inappropriate conversations with his daughter, starts pastry shop fights, and in the middle of the film leads a James Bond-worthy speedboat chase through the canals. It’s easy to love everything about Amsterdamned and I suspect that Spielberg himself was a fan, as Maas was later a director on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.