Movies - Great White

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	Movies - Great White

Great White (original title: L'Ultimo Squalo) is an Italian 1980 horror film by Enzo G. Castellari. It is infamous for plagiarizing Jaws
. The movie stars James Franciscus and Vic Morrow.

Taglines::

A quiet, restful summer in the lazy coastal town of Port Harbor is abruptly about to end.
You're what's for dinner.

Plot

The plot is a classic of the Jaws-like genre: an enormous and angry 35-foot Great White Shark takes revenge on humans when they build a beach just for swimmers by a coastal town. Despite the several shark attacks, the mayor does nothing to stop it as he doesn't want tourists to hear about it and quit coming. Enter the heroes: Peter Benton (James Franciscus), a novelist who writes a book about sharks, and Ron Hamer (Vic Morrow), an old seadog who has a personal grudge against the shark and wants it dead. They set sail in order to stop the monster.

Critics

The movie's similarities with Jaws are very obvious to anyone who has seen Steven Spielberg
's classic. Not only is the premise similar to the latter, but the characters are quite too, and several scenes look to have been essentially copied from the original movie (such as the buoy-attached-to-the-shark scene). This especially infuriated Universal Pictures, who sued to have the release of this movie in North America blocked because they claimed it was a Jaws rip-off. Universal Pictures won the case, and the movie was pulled from North American theaters shortly after its release.
The special effects are very cheap. Only the head of the shark is seen in the film, and it looks very plastic-like and stiff. And when the shark is attacking its victims, those latters are obviously dummies. This also has meant that the film has never been legally released on video in North America, nor shown on North American television.
Stock footage from aquatic life documentaries is used in underwater shark scenes. Not only the typical filming makes it obvious, but the shark is often not shown as the same species. It is supposed to be a Great White, but also appears as a catshark (this one just after it appeared as a Great White), a Hammerhead shark or even a dolphin.
As is a typical trait of Castellari's movies, slow motions are used a lot in an amateurish attempt to put "dramatic" effect.
The movie was featured in the 2004 documentary, The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made.

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Movies - Great White

Plot

Critics

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