★★★.5 out of ★★★★★
🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Stephen Scarlata.
It’s not a sharksploitation film unless someone yells “get out of the water!”
Peter Benchley clearly understood that we like our demons. We fear them. We revere them. We hunt, fight, and hide from them. Sharks are the ultimate demon. The apex predator. The thing we all fear. Turns out our fears and deeply rational, irrational, and EASILY exploited.
To be sure, the human/shark relationship is a rather complicated one. Taking many of its queues from thalassophobia, or the darkest fears of large and deep water, Sharksploitation knows exactly what freaks us out. In the new horror documentary from Shudder director Stephen Scarlata dives into this fear and metes out all the reasons why sharks and horror are the perfect bloody union.
While the film discusses many different phases of shark-based horror there is really one moment in time where the entire genre experienced a tectonic shift — you guessed it… Jaws. Certainly Scarlata’s film could have been entirely about Jaws and the vast cultural impact it had on cinema, but he takes a more nuanced approach looking at films before Jaws, the exploitation films that immediately followed Jaws, and the massive SyFy industry that’s brought us Toxic Shark, Ghost Shark, Mississippi River Sharks, Megashark vs. Crocosaurus, and six, yes six, Sharknado films.
Maybe even more fascinating is the fact the entire sharkploitation industry hinges on the idea of the rogue shark. While Benchley brought this to the table in his novel it was Spielberg that largely pounded this concept into our consciousness. The idea that there could be a shark that could get a taste for human blood and singularly seek out humans as its food source. While the rogue shark concept has been entirely debunked by shark biologists everywhere, it is this idea that was mostly given life under the watchful eye of a young Spielberg.
Prior to Jaws, sharks in literature, religion, and 20th century film were either revered as gods or brought on as helpful ocean navigators. From the 1920s to the 70s sharks were certainly in films, but films were not about sharks.
Even the great 1969 Burt Reynolds film Shark, originally titled Caine (after the Burt Reynolds character), sharks were somewhat of an afterthought in the film. Not until stuntman Jose Marco was killed by a shark during filming did producers decide to change the film’s name. In a rather gruesome move, the morbid producers also decided to keep the shark attack that killed the stuntman in the film. In a gruesome move part II, they decided to re-relase the film after Jaws’ success, with a new tagline: More Bite Than Jaws. If there was ever any question, these moribund producers clearly proved that shark movies are all about exploitation.
Fans of the SyFy Network and the wild and woolly world of mutant sharks will love the film’s discussion of the evolution of these films, Roger Corman’s involvement in this low-budget lunacy, and the backwards way in which many of these films are created. When SyFy came online in 1992, they knew the had a LOT of airtime to fill. There had to be regular films and they had to be CHEAP. The pace at which they were required to find content was quickly overtaken by the most cost-effective approach to contract these films out to people like the aforementioned Roger Corman and Asylum productions.
Even though many in the SyFy universe, including Roger Corman, have balked at the idea of too many shark films, that are far too absurd, and cross too many lines of decency, the fans unending appetite for garbage has won out. Over the last couple decades we’ve been blessed (?) with literally hundreds of shark films proving that there is NO bottom to this barrel of garbage and there continues to be enough room for Sharkula, Sharkenstein, and Amityville Shark House.
Sharksploitation is an effective vehicle that really helps to define our interest in this genre and all of its sub-sub-sub genres. While the later part of the film does flip around in a partially non-linear way — thanks to the SyFy universe of lunacy — the film does a nice job of explaining the pre and post Jaws world, and more importantly, why we continue to be so darn spooked by the ocean and what lurks beneath the surface.
Sharksploitation is currently on Shudder.