Rent Shark (1969)

"Jaws" it ain't! - Shark review by Count Otto Black

You know you're in trouble when the very first credit reveals that the movie was picked up for video distribution by Troma, meaning that it's an absolute piece of shit, but they could get it cheap and maybe the name "Burt Reynolds" would fool people into thinking it might be good. Not even Burt Reynolds thought it was good, judging by the way he sleepwalks through the film.

This is obviously a poor-quality video transfer from a bad print, with a grainy picture in television aspect ratio, washed-out color, and badly distorted sound. From the opening scene in which a diver swims around for quite some time, occasionally appearing in the same shot as a very small and totally disinterested shark, but mostly being menaced by stock footage, before we suddenly get some blurred and unconvincing close-ups of sharks biting what looks like a wetsuit stuffed with fish (it doesn't help that in this crummy print, the blood is yellow), you'll guess how bad the rest of the movie is going to be. And you'll be right.

Sam Fuller made some very interesting films, but this isn't one of them. It's a formulaic piece of crap obviously shot in North Africa because everything's a lot cheaper over there, plus you can pad the film with location footage. Burt Reynolds plays a listless version of his default charming rogue, and Fuller directs as though the only thing about the movie that interested him was his paycheck. The locals in minor parts succeed in looking much more interested than the stars because hey, they're in a movie, and they have no idea how bad it is, but of course, none of them can act. There's a pretty girl who can't act very well but manages to look vaguely interested in Burt Reynolds, an irritating little kid who can't act at all, comical bits of business that go on forever and involve lots of fruit stalls falling over because that never ceases to amuse, and...

Oh, who cares! I didn't watch the whole sorry mess because it was painful rather than entertaining. Maybe it gets really exciting for five minutes at the end, but I simply couldn't be bothered to find out. Though I did see enough to understand why nobody ever points out that a movie about people being attacked by sharks came out a whole six years before "Jaws". If anybody actually saw this in 1969, they soon forgot about it, and quite right too.