Deliver the money shot. Is that so hard? Apparently, for many working in the sharksploitation subgenre — or, “shark movies,” as they’re more colloquially known — a little audience service is out of the question. “Jaws” will be 50 years old this summer. In the five decades following Steven Spielberg’s groundbreaking masterpiece, most sharksploitation has been chopped up and diluted into chum, tossed into the water by careless, filmmaking fishermen. Most of these films are tired, run-of-the-mill ocean thrillers that recycle the same beats of better movies that have come before. And they expect me to gobble up that bait, like some sort of fool? Now I know how sharks feel as their oceanic ecosystems are corrupted, leaving some to rely on whatever food they can find.
That sounds a bit glib, comparing my love of shark films to the very real and immediate threats of shark endangerment. But if you’ve jumped into these tepid waters anytime over the last decade or so, you know that shark horror is in dire straits. “Jaws” was not the first of its kind; it just perfected the creature feature formula, where audiences are teased and titillated by glimpses of what they fear, before being treated to a gratuitous scare that rewards them for their patience. This has, for some odd reason, fallen by the wayside. (Probably the cost of decent CGI, and because no one is willing to get off their a** and build a massive, practical, frequently malfunctioning animatronic shark, like that’s so hard!) Now, it’s like pulling teeth to get a shark film with more than one decent creature shot — the 300 razor-sharp teeth of a great white, to be exact.
