‘CHUM: The Early Wave of JAWS Rip-Offs’

By James Ryan

“Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain
this similarity of pattern in members of the same class…”
– Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859

“It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”
– Jean-Luc Godard (supposedly)

They started going into production almost before the film’s first weekend’s grosses were reported.

It shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise that these films were going to be greenlit. It had happened long before, when Stagecoach made everyone want Westerns that you could pay attention to. It’d happened again after that, when The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms gave us the giant monster attacks the city films of the 1950s. It’d had happened just before this, when The Exorcist had the Devil possess so, so many people. It would happen again a few years later, when Star Wars made everyone want space operas that you could pay attention to.

Demand doesn’t always assure that the supply would be any good, however. Which is why, in the first few years after the release of Jaws, the films that were put before audiences who wanted more of the same were at best a mixed bag.

None of these could quite give that audience the same experience that Spielberg’s film had delivered, even for those few theatergoers there were somehow unaware of the terror Amity Island faced from ‘Bruce.’

Some of the more notable of those results, in fact, were, well…

Grizzly
(1976, Film Ventures International/Columbia Pictures, Dir: William Girdler)

One of the first out of the gate, we find ourselves in a film set in an unnamed national park (shot in Georgia) being menaced by a very large bear, either 15 feet tall or 18 depending on either the script or the promo poster. We got Christopher George filling in the public-safety minded Roy Scheider role, as the head park ranger, assisted by Richard Jaeckel playing the naturalist who is the Richard Dreyfus analog, and Andrew Prine filling in for shark-hunting Robert Shaw as a helicopter pilot. This film can boast that their creature is 100% natural, played by an 11-foot tall Kodiak bear named Teddy, who was really into the role; the work from rest of the cast, on the other hand…

Mako: The Jaws of Death
(1976, Cannon Films, Dir: William Grefe)

Yes, it’s got sharks, and the sharks do chomp on the locals, but they’re the good guys… Grefe’s film, the script for which was written years before Jaws was released, ended up being made thanks to the demand for shark films. Centered around Richard Jeeckel as a Vietnam vet, who after being saved by sharks was able to communicate with them and became their protector, the film had no Jaws lead analogs, making it much closer to Willard than Jaws.

Squirm
(1976, American International Pictures, Dir: Jeff Lieberman)

No, a single worm can’t really compete with a great white shark, but hundreds of thousands of them, well-l-l… For a small-scale production shot in Georgia on the cheap, with no real analogs to the main roles in Jaws, this film manages to get a lot from its amateur cast, with an able assist from Rick Baker as the makeup designer. It plays a little fast and loose with the whole concept of the “when nature attacks” genre, but doesn’t make you feel like you wasted your time watching this.

Day of the Animals
(1977, Film Ventures International/Warner Brothers, Dir: William Girdler)

After Film Ventures International made millions the year before with Grizzly, they called up Girdler and decided to get the band back together, this time backed by a large chorus… Foregoing humans from Jaws analogs, more animals wasn’t necessarily better here, but points to them for explaining the behavior of the beasts; collective frenzy as being brought on by depletion of the ozone layer; no, that’s not how that works, but flagging this issue ten years before we got the Montreal Protocol, hey…

Tentacles
(1977, American International Pictures, Dir: Ovidio G. Assonitis)

They say that octopi can be found at much deeper depths in the ocean than sharks, which this one pretty well suggests from the depths this one goes to… Bo Hopkins does double duty here as both Dreyfus and Shaw; Claude Akins could probably have been Scheider if the script was paying attention to the film it was ripping off. If nothing else, the argument that octopi are supposed to be smarter than humans gets a big boost when these mollusks go up against everyone involved with this pic…

Orca
(1977, Paramount Pictures, Dir: Michael Anderson)

Producer Dino De Laurentiis specifically put this together to cash in on the interest in Jaws, which, yes, was another bad idea of his… Richard Harris is filling in for Shaw, and Charlotte Rampling for Dreyfus, but there’s no room in this script for any character as sympathetic as Scheider, or for that matter any sympathetic qualities in the leads. This battle is personal between Harris and the titular creature, with all six tons of the heavy played by marine park performing whales Yaka and Nepo in alternating scenes. They tried to evoke comparisons to Ahab and Moby Dick, but ended up with something closer to Tom and Jerry…

The Swarm
(1978, Warner Brothers, Dir: Irwin Allen)

Some readers may not know that “killer bees” were an actual thing people worried about then, the “murder hornets” of their time. So, it makes sense that folks would want to give what would turn out to be Irwin Allen’s biggest mistake a chance at the box office. We got Michael Cain as both Dreyfus and Shaw, and a half-hearted effort from Richard Widmark to fill the Scheider role, but millions of bees doing things no shark could ever do was too much for the audience; the bees got their chance, then ended up smoked off screens quickly…

Piranha
(1978, New World Pictures, Dir: Joe Dante)

By this time, some people making films felt that the concept of the animal attack film couldn’t be accepted at face value. When Joe Dante and screenwriter John Sayles were handed the project by Roger Corman, their rework of the script made their film a knowing semi-parody of Jaws that still managed to stand on its own. This time, we got Heather Menzies in the Scheider role, Bradford Dillman standing in for Shaw, and Kevin McCarthy doing Dreyfus with a twist. The quality for this outing was actually above average, so much so that when Universal considered litigation against the film (feeling that New World trying to release it the same weekend Jaws 2 premiered constituted unfair competition), the suit was abandoned when Spielberg had good things to say about Dante’s film.

Nightwing
(1979, Columbia Pictures, Dir: Arthur Hiller)

Coming out towards the end of the early years of Jaws-ploitation, the film feels more like the mold it was cast from was that for The Birds; the sprinkling of the supernatural that the pic doesn’t commit too heavily to makes its tie in with Spielberg’s film even more tenuous. We pretty well dispense with Shaw here, getting Nick Mancuso in Scheider’s place and David Warner doing Dreyfus. While lost in the pack/herd/school/what-have-you of animal attack films of the time, it started to see a reassessment decades later.

Up From the Depths
(1979, New World Pictures, Charles B. Griffith)

As the first wave sputtered, people stopped having fun and laughing at the concept. Charles Howerton tries to film both the Scheider and Dreyfus roles, with Sam Bottoms trying to be Shaw, neither actor doing anything close to fulfilling their purpose in the rip-off. After the film was shot as a comedy, Roger Corman took the film and re-cut it with all the jokes removed, save for the joke that this film turned out to be… If anything, it was a precursor for things to come, in that rather than try and give the audience a new way to fear and appreciate the creatures of the wild, it created a new one, foreshadowing what we’d get with The Meg some 39 years later.

You may notice how few of these films actually have sharks in them. As it happened, many of the films that came out in the years immediately after Jaws’ release had to find a way to capture the experience and vibe of watching the original film without being so close to the original that they would end up being sued by Universal. When Film Ventures International pressed their luck following Grizzly and Day of the Animals and attempted to exhibit Great White (aka The Last Shark), the lawsuit Universal brought against them cut the theatrical window for that film to a single month.

Original Italian theatrical poster for Great White

The timing for that was notable, in that there’s an undefined statute of limitations in the industry, as to when making a film that tries to suggest a popular movie goes from being a quick cash grab to a homage. It’s hard to define, that moment where going for a quick buck is the main reason the project comes about, especially today with a film being active on so many platforms at once. It may be safe to assume that at the time of this lawsuit, that point for Jaws-inspired films reached that moment, when reporting the film’s weekend grosses no longer mattered.

By then, the spotlight had shifted, during which the next round of taking elsewhere films that were of similarity in pattern would start all over again…