CRUEL JAWS Charts Wild Waters
(Okay, so this intro is to be read/sung to the tune of Taylor Swift’s 2019 magnum opus Cruel Summer. CRUEL JAWS, Cruel Summer….you see how it’s funny. Why didn’t I go with the more popular and widely known 1983 Bananarama song, also called Cruel Summer? Well, because I hadn’t thought of it until three-quarters of the way through, and I’m now pot committed.
Anyway….to be sung to the tune of Taylor Swift’s Cruel Summer)
Spielberg made JAWS in ‘75
You know that we loved him
Bad, bad films, followed up more than twice
You know that we hate them
Bruno Mattei made it okay
William Snyder, that was his assumed name
Movie’s really bad, a good time was had
I thought JAWS was dead, now I want more
And it's gold, this shitty movie
It's old, the footage it’s got
And it's ooh, whoa, oh
It's CRUEL JAAAAWS
It's cool, that's what they told us
No rules in JAWS franchise heaven
But ooh, whoa oh
It's CRUEL JAAAAWS
With you
CRUEL JAWS (1995)
Directed by: Bruno Mattei (under the name of William Snyder)
Starring: Richard Dew, David Luther, George Barnes Jr, Scott Silveria
Written by: Robert Feen, Linda Morrison, Mattei
Released: September 26, 1995
Length: 96 minutes
What is CRUEL JAWS? Well, what isn’t CRUEL JAWS?
In a way, it’s yet another follow-up to the 1975 original JAWS movie, or least kind of a remake, in the sense that a major public event in danger of being cancelled sits at the middle of everything. It seems pretty clear from the several violent shark attacks that an annual regatta should be cancelled. Alas, there’s a greedy public official that insists it must go on for REASONS! That feels enough like the JAWS we know and love, right? I mean, there’s even JAWS footage in CRUEL JAWS. What more do you need? Heck, CRUEL JAWS was even marketed as JAWS 5 in some markets.
Well, the problem is that CRUEL JAWS is in no way affiliated with the Universal film franchise, nor does it follow any of the Brody family members we’ve seen in the first four movies. Its only real connection, besides the vague outline mentioned above, is the shark and the fact that they put the word JAWS in the title. It’s barely a movie, if you start really considering what a movie might be “defined” as. Does it matter if, like, a third of your film is footage of other movies entirely?
What CRUEL JAWS really is, then, is an early version of one of those Asylum movies that are meant to trick the most uncritical among the world’s population, the off-brand bagged cereal version of Hollywood blockbusters. They’re the people behind such beloved classics as TRANSMORPHERS, SNAKES ON A TRAIN, THE DA VINCI TREASURE, AVENGERS GRIMM: TIME WARS, THE FAST AND THE FIERCE….these are just the ones I felt like looking up. They’re un-lovingly dubbed “mockbusters”, mostly meant to give actors like C. Thomas Howell something to do with the intent of people at home not looking too closely at what they’re clicking on with their Amazon Prime account.
Anyway, that’s what CRUEL JAWS is. It’s more or less a shitty photocopy of the 1975 original, although it often goes above and beyond the call of duty. The movie splices in footage from the other four JAWS movies, as well as lifting the majority of its final act from another Italian sharksploitation movie, 1989’s DEEP BLOOD. Again, they even had the nerve to straight up advertise this in some markets as JAWS 5, something that was almost certainly illegal.
The “unofficial sequel” to another, more popular movie is a long-standing cinematic tradition that’s still alive and well to this day. All it really takes to get into the game is a good understanding of your country’s copyright laws, as well as knowledge of who, if anybody, owns the rights to your preferred intellectual property. Just staying in Italy, the undisputed kings of this particular art form, there’s at least 30 unofficial sequels to 1967’s DJANGO, and countless unofficial follow-ups to George Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. There are also waaaay more unofficial TERMINATOR follow-ups than you might be aware of. Here in the United States, within the past ten years, we’ve had unofficial follow-ups to such heavy-hitting movies as EASY RIDER and RAGING BULL.
Thus comes CRUEL JAWS, one amongst many in the “sharksploitation” genre (started by JAWS, reignited with stuff like DEEP BLUE SEA, and forever bolstered by the endless SHARKNADO series). There are many crappy shark movies, but only one brave enough to basically just call itself JAWS. However, it’s insane enough that fans have embraced it as a sort-of “fifth Beatle” of JAWS movies anyway.
The plot of CRUEL JAWS insomuch as it matters: in Hampton Bay, Florida, rich landlord Samuel Lewis (Barnes. Jr) is set to foreclose on the aquarium/theme park owned by Dag Soerensen (Dew). Despite the fact that there never appears to be any guests coming to this place in any of the scenes set at this property, this comes as a total shock to Dag, who has a little wheelchair-bound daughter to take care of, Suzy (Kristen Urso).
At the same time, a bunch of dumb guys are scuba diving in the middle of the sea to find the remains of an old military ship, the Cleveland, in the hopes of finding and selling top secret Navy documents. Alas, they all get attacked and eaten by a tiger shark.
It is against this backdrop that we get our classic JAWS situation: there’s a big Regatta coming up. Do we cancel due to the tiger shark out there that literally killed three people, or do we just kinda shrug and pretend we didn’t hear anything about it? What about little Suzy? The answer to this question determines who will be our heroes and who will be our villains.
From there, the Regatta goes on to be a spectacular and bloody mess, the local mafia gets involved, it’s revealed that Cruel Jaws is the result of some government experiment (oh, spoilers, I guess), the shark takes out an entire helicopter, and Suzy almost gets her very own MAC AND ME moment.
Okay, sounds pretty bad, right? So, what is there to recommend with CRUEL JAWS? Well, for starters, Richard Dew looks exactly like Hulk Hogan, which helps almost any film. The movie is also sort of watchable in its low budget badness, the kind of movie Mystery Science Theatre 3000 might have gotten around to in its original incarnation if it had existed for another couple of years. It contains probably four or five of the worst performances I’ve ever seen in a movie, even at the low standards something like CRUEL JAWS inherently implies. Whether this is enticing in any way, I leave up to you, but it speaks to the brazen “who gives a fuck” nature to the whole enterprise. Finally, as mentioned, much of its key action is spliced in from other movies. Don’t worry, though, you definitely can tell exactly what is “new” footage and what is shitty, grainy stolen footage.
Then, of course, there’s the CRUEL JAWS theme. It’s a wild little tune, a melody that is pretty clearly just a bunch of film score snippets stapled together and played over and over. I had read about it ahead of time, so I knew it was coming, and yet, nothing really prepares you for the Star Wars theme to start playing in the middle of a completely unrelated movie, does it? It still came as a total surprise to me. Isn’t this illegal? Can’t Lucasfilm shut this entire production down in a second and end the careers of everybody involved? CRUEL JAWS don’t care, baby! They have a scene that needs scoring, STAR WARS is a beloved movie….just give the people what they want!
(Also, the rest of the theme sounded so familiar to me, especially its opening, epic salvo. I don’t believe for a second that a single note of it was written specifically for this movie. Does anybody know where else Mattei pulled from in order to create this masterpiece?)
I think it’s all these factors (plus, so many more, but at what point am I ruining the potential mystifying fun that is CRUEL JAWS for you?) that make this “mockbuster” so fun, and why it’s actually sort of truly the defacto JAWS 5, or at least an essential part of the franchise for the dedicated. You just don’t see stuff like this quite so often. There are an infinite number of unbelievably amateur movies made every year/month/day. There are also a seemingly infinite number of mind-numbing IP extensions made every summer. You just don’t expect to see those two subgenres merge like this, in a way that feels against the law. Why is the STAR WARS theme playing? Why is that the line reading they kept in the final cut? Why did Mattei pick William Snyder as his nom-de-plume and not his more-common much cooler alias Vincent Dawn? Why is every character seemingly obsessed with ripping people’s balls off? The only man who can answer these questions died for our sins about 2,000 years ago and thus has done enough for us already.
By the way, don’t let the above make you think CRUEL JAWS is the forgotten THE ROOM or BIRDEMIC or anything. It often drags or, more accurately, just sits there and frustrates. It stacks plot elements on top of each other in desperate search of something that sticks. I would argue, though, that this is all part of the CRUEL JAWS experience. At the end of the day, it shouldn’t be all that satisfying, because that would imply that the movie had an end goal to entertain anybody. Say what you want about Tommy Wiseau, but that guy at least wants you to have a good time. Bruno Mattei is just here for the cash-in; any pleasure derived from his work is purely coincidental.
In a sense, CRUEL JAWS is the perfect logical end to our deep dive into this seminal shark franchise. After all, there is no movie that could better position itself as the complete photo negative of the original JAWS. Consider everything that movie did so well; its innate sense of emotion and tension, its focus on humanity and character over special effects, the production’s ability to improvise out of adversity, a trio of the best damn performances of its decade, one of the most efficient and precise uses of musical score maybe ever, and most of all, how not one single second, nay, not one single frame is wasted or superfluous.
Now consider CRUEL JAWS, and how it’s the complete opposite of every single one of those categories.
How could it not bring everything full circle?