Abyss-Mal Cinema: MONSTER SHARK (1984)

Growing up in the shadow of greatness must be a complicated thing. On the one hand, they get to be a neppo baby and work in the notoriously difficult to enter Hollywood film industry in their youth, get their first film made and distributed in their 20s and deny any nepotism to the press, saying things like "I worked hard to get where I am and it wasn't easy." On the other hand, having to constantly be compared to the towering public image of your legendary parent has got to be a real pain in the ass. I'm not a fan of Nick Cage, but I do appreciate that he didn't use his famous family name of Coppola to get his foot in the door. Sure, you can argue that, like Emilo Estevez, not using the famous name is really only a minor handicap. Because of the insular nature of Hollywood, everybody knows who you are, even if some of them don't realize it until after you show up at the audition.

As an American who did not grow up with the internet, the paltry info that I could get on Italian genre filmmakers came from books and sometimes magazines, most of which took a pretty dim view of Italian genre cinema right out of the gate. It still feels a little bizarre to walk into my local art-house theater and see the ticket taker wearing a Dario Argento t-shirt or even just hear young people rave about horror movies that aren't American. Back in the day, cult movies were in fact, cult movies. Because of this, I had no idea of how Lamberto Bava fared in his father's immense shadow in Italy, but I suspect it wasn't easy. Probably even less easy because no matter how much I enjoy Lamberto's works for what they are, he really can't hold a candle to his pops, Mario. But then again, who can?

Fair warning: Thar be spoilers ahead.

Styled more like a giallo than a traditional horror movie, we have a lot of plot, a lot of characters and their story arcs are intercut around the threat of an aquatic killer. Opening with a Florida coast guard chopper discovering half of a boat and half of a man in the water, two scuba divers jump from the copter to rescue what's left of the sailor. They do this while screaming "aaaaaaaaaaaaahhh!" as I'm sure you are taught to do at the Coast Guard Academy. Meanwhile, Dr. Bob (Dino Conti) and his Budweiser can are patrolling the sea in the Seaquarium research vessel. Suddenly they are assaulted by some weird shit that crashes into the ship and sets off his sensors. Back at what appears to be an ocean park (according to Sopkiw, possibly University of Miami in Key Biscayne), Dr. Stella (Valentine Monnier) is feeding her Disney-named dolphins when they abruptly go berserk and start thrashing around in the water. When Flipper starts flippin' out you know shit is going down.

The coroner informs Sheriff Gordon (the great Gianni Garko) that the guy that the coast guard fished out of the ocean has bite marks far too big for a shark! This news seems to make the sheriff concerned. As if that wasn't bad enough, Dr. Bob discovers that his audio recordings of whatever it was that attacked the Seaquarium ship are now blank! This means one thing: "only Peter can help" says Dr. Bob. "Peter?" says Dr. Stella, echoing audience sentiment.

Peter (Michael Sopkiw), the local electronics expert, is all set to escape to New York for his vacation, which is weird because he just fought George Eastman there and I wouldn't think he'd want to go back. Fortunately for him Dr. Stella remembers and shows up begging him to stall his trip for one day to make a special kind of "converter" that would pick up the strange sounds that they believe to be at a frequency that their current equipment cannot record. Peter folds faster than a Silicon Valley startup and has to tear his assistant Sandra (Iris Peynado) away from a game of Activision's "Sea Quest" in order to get cracking on this new piece of tech. Damn, where was this girl when I was a teen? Oh yeah, making out with Michael Sopkiw...

Meanwhile, marine scientist Dr. Davis (Lawrence Morgant) is working in the lab, late one night... on the boss' wife Sonja (Dagmar Lassander). The pair are seen by lab assistant Florinda (Cinzia de Ponti) who happens to be walking past a window causing Sonja to panic. After a man with a particular style of watch calls Florinda and she tells him that he can't get away with "it" and that she is going to go to the press, she starts to pack up her clothes and calls a taxi to get out of town pronto! Apparently she realized that she was on dangerous ground, as a man named Miller (Paul Branco) breaks into Florinda's home at strangles her in seconds flat with his... fists? Is that an Italian thing? Being the crafty dude that Miller is, he sets her body in a bath with a hair dryer to make it appear to be an accident. Since this is an Italian production, it makes sense that the screenwriters would think that the cops would just ignore the bruising on the neck and obvious signs of suffocation and just chalk the whole thing up to an accident. Err, did I not say this was essentially a giallo?

Even later that night, after being seduced by Sandra, Peter finds Miller and another man in his workshop smashing the shit out of the new sensor that he had made. This upsets him, so the two interlopers decide to smash the shit out of Peter too. The plot thickens! I would make a crack about the plot thinning, but good lord, this has more stuff going on that is not about a homicidal sea beast than Peter Benchley's 1974 novel, "Jaws". This actually works for me far better than Benchley's hackneyed Mafia stereotypes. I get that THE GODFATHER (1972) was a big hit and that Mafia angle probably sold just as may copies as the shark thing, but at least a detective-mystery plot is timeless. Seriously, if you have never read Benchley's novel, you should do it, if for no other reason than to truly appreciate how well-crafted the JAWS (1975) screenplay turned out.

After an attack on two speargun fisherman, the doctors at the hospital are convinced that it was the work of the same shark-ish thing and take a cast of one of the wounds. The result is a giant plaster tooth that is definitely not of shark origin. The sheriff is alarmed by this, though his deputy is more interested in the new waitress with the "headlamps", which leads the sheriff to comment "lotsa new things in this town recently: waitresses, sharks and a gal who calls a taxi and then takes a bath..." Later in the film, the one surviving fisherman will finally give up the ghost at which point the doctor says "He's dead." The sheriff (who would in real life probably be the local coroner) notes the cause of death: "It was fear. Fear stopped his heart." Remind me never to be a victim and end up in a Florida hospital.

Peter, Dr. Bob and Dr. Stella roam the seas and have a brief encounter with our not-shark, while two unlucky seniors have their boat attacked by a tentacled beast with massive teeth. This calls for... another doctor! Yes, as if the cast wasn't packed like sardines as it is, enter Dr. Janet (Darla N. Warner, wife of one of the movie's money men) who proceeds to lecture the group on what exactly this creature, which hasn't been seen by any living person, might be. She starts off her lecture by telling them that 320 years ago fish developed teeth. Hoo boy, we are already off to a rough start as that would be the 1600s. She continues, saying that the Tylosaurus appeared at the beginning of the "Setaceous period, about 120 million years ago" or, if you are not Luigi Cozzi, during the late Cretaceous period, about 92 to 66 million years ago. But that's not important right now, because "the true ancestor of the shark, as we know it today, was the Pseudogalacias Volta, and it appeared at the end of the Setaceous era, 60 million years ago." Wait, what?! The Fake Electric Spaniard?? Ok, so never mind what a Pseudogalacias Volta is (other than my new band name), but 60 million years ago was the start of the Phanerozoic period. Because of this, I absolutely believe her when she says that she put this information into "the computer" and it said that this creature was a living fossil. So, Mitch McConnell? Unblinking stare, destroys people's lives and has no remorse? Yeah, that checks out.

At this point Dr. Bob and his Budwiser say that it has to be taken alive! I would say that the beer can is surgically grafted to Dr. Bob's hand, except every now and then, he angrily throws one into the water. Hey, you don't know, maybe he's trying to build an artificial reef. The sheriff, because he is a sheriff, is going to stop it "his own way!" which translates to "blow shit up!" This leads to a race between the factions to see who can catch it or kill it.

Of course, this being the movie that this is, we find out that Sandra gave Peter's shop keys to Miller in order to destroy the "converter"! It is implied that they had a relationship at some point (which is just weird) and she gave him the keys, possibly out of fear, although this subplot is instantly forgotten and appears to be included only as a way for Peter to hook up with the white girl, Dr. Stella, and not come off like a womanizing sleaze. While this is going on, Professor West (William Berger) shows up and tries to get access to a computer file called Sea Killer. I mean, if you are going to set up a black ops project about an ancient octopus shark hybrid that I think was engineered in a lab for a profit-hungry corporation, isn't that project name a bit on the nose? After many attempts and a single, tiny screw being turned inside of a machine, we find out that this beast is Dr. Davis' project and that the creature's cells live only eight months before they reproduce! If they wait too much longer or if the creature gets blowed up, as the sheriff says "we could find ourselves up to our asses in monsters!" 

We get more tentacle attacks, including one in which Dr. Janet manages to survive because of a handy hatchet. Just think of those poor Japanese schoolgirls. How many could have been saved had they only had easy access to some outdoor woodworking tools. Even so, things do not go well for Dr. Janet as fucking Miller shows up to kill everyone on the Seaquarium, leading to an underwater fight scene between Peter and Dr. Stella against Miller and one of his kneecappers. Sopkiw has said in interviews that it was one of his favorite things that he's done in a movie and is a genuinely great moment, showing Lamberto's level of commitment on a shoestring budget. Any modern low-rent shark-monster flick would have those pages torn out of the script on day one.

On our way to the climactic showdown with the beast, Professor West confronts Dr. Davis who tells him that he dunnit because "our future is in the sea" and that it was his plan to use his created monster to "protect an exploitable area". Nothing about how he plans to get at the exploitable stuff in that exploitable area when it's being guarded by a very angry homicidal monster, but one step at a time, I guess. The best part about this tying up of plot threads is that West literally explains the giallo twist in a line of dialogue saying: "giving her lover the identical watch she gave her husband for an anniversary present..." So it was Dr. Davis giving the orders to Miller the whole time! For a scientist, he really didn't think this whole thing through, did he? Fortunately the sheriff was just out of sight, hears the whole confession and is able to take down the mad scientist while striking an oddly Western gunslinger pose. Weird, eh? This all leads to a showdown with flamethrowers in the Everglades (or according to Spokiw, an Italian swamp) in literally 12 inches of water. Yes, flamethrowers and water. And a giant sea monster in a what is tantamount to a shallow stream. 

Initially set to produce the movie, brothers Sergio and Luciano Martino approached the Italian genre stalwart Luigi Cozzi to write a killer shark movie set in the waterways of Venice. Cozzi wrote the script, titled DEVOURING JAWS, that both Martino's approved of, but Sergio got involved in directing no less than four films in 1983, including the classic 2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK. This put the shark project on hold until the decision was made to retool the script for a smaller budget and hand the production duties over to veteran Mino Loy, who produced such greats as HAVE A GOOD FUNERAL MY FRIEND, SARTANA WILL PAY (1970) and EATEN ALIVE! (1980), and French porn director Max Pécas who may be best known in the English speaking world as the director of the utterly batshit insane cop movie BRIGADE OF DEATH (1985). The directorial duties were then handed to Lamberto Bava. Since the budget was sparse, Bava decided to revamp the script once again into a sort of giallo of the sea. Apparently Gianfranco Clerici, Vincenzo Mannino, Herve Piccini and the Italian genre veteran  Dardano Sacchetti helped out in this respect, which probably explains how the plot became so convoluted, particularly for what was ostensibly a simple monster movie.

Originally titled SHARK: RED ON THE WATER, MONSTER SHARK was released on US VHS as DEVIL FISH, which to be honest, is a great title. Along with the fantastic art, which was not exclusive to the US, suckered me into renting the tape as a teenager. For reasons that will probably never be known, the US distributor Vidmark Entertainment retitled and heavily re-edited the film. In addition to inserting the shots of the small monster puppet travelling through the water so that they appear many more times during the film, they took the entire scene of the archetypical Florida senior couple being attacked by the creature that appears in the middle of the film and brought it up to be the opening scene. Additionally, they cut what minor gore that there was to begin with and removed all of the nudity as well as the minor profanity (I'm pretty sure about this, but since my VHS tape is long gone and I can't pay collector's prices for another one, I'm unable to double check). This seems a really bizarre choice to make. It is entirely possible that Vidmark bought a TV print on the cheap and slapped an R rating on the box to sucker kids like me into renting a neutered product. It was a fairly common practice in the early to mid '80s and was the bane of my hormone-infested existence. At the time, I was really disappointed by the movie, particularly since I had really high expectations for Italian genre films with the likes of DEMONS (1985) getting theatrical playdates in my area and with Lamberto Bava and Dario Argento's names blazing from the posters and ads. Argento's PHENOMENA (1985) had also been released in American theaters and on VHS about the same time, under the title CREEPERS, and even though it was even more heavily censored than DEVIL FISH, it was still a jaw-dropping movie that completely refused to ape American horror cinema of the time.

Years later I got to see an import version of what we now know as MONSTER SHARK and my opinion changed. Sure it's still not as good as it could have been, but I think it's a pretty damn entertaining film in sometimes the wrong ways, but also in the right ways. The monster itself is actually really impressive for a couple of reasons. For one, it's a full size puppet and in my humble opinion looks far better than the usual stock shark footage or simple shark head found in other similar films. Unfortunately we don't get to see much of it in the film as Lamberto wasn't as impressed and found it unmanageable, regulating it to glimpsed flashes of it's teeth, an eye, a tentacle, here and there. Secondly, the design of the head is actually based on some archeological research. While I made fun of Dr. Janet's history lesson, someone was paying attention in pre-history class because during the late Devonian period (382-358 million years ago), we got an aquatic nightmare that made a Great White look like a King Prawn: the Dunkleosteus. Among its sphincter-clenching specs, these fish had dermal bone armor and their jaws, instead of teeth, were all bone and acted as shears that could open twice as fast as the blink of a human eye, had the strongest bite force of any animal on earth and could easily slice through skulls and armor plating. If you look at the fossils and artist renderings of the Dunkleosteus and it's kin, you can easily see where the creators of the Monster Shark got their ideas. Additionally, I give it bonus points because in 2010, to my eternal shame, Roger Corman's New Horizons made a knock-off for the SyFy Channel titled SHARKTOPUS. Because it's the modern era where nobody takes shit seriously, we got a cheap CGI monster sporting the front half of a shark and the back half of an octopus. I know it was popular enough to spawn sequels, but c'mon after seeing that, I give huge props to the unsung heroes who put together a life-size Monster Shark puppet that actually drew upon the archeological record for inspiration instead of slapping some shit together on what looks like a Silicon Graphics Workstation. Rog could do better. We all know that.

I also feel the need to point out the amazing cast, although I strongly suspect that if you are visiting this website, you know exactly who these folks are. In addition to Michael Sopkiw in one of his mere four movies made under the same contract, you have Valentine Monnier, who appeared with Sopkiw in 2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK; the legendary Gianni Garko, veteran of giallos, westerns, crime and even some peplums and comedies; William Berger, a veteran with an even more varied career in practically every genre you can name; and Dagmar Lassander, yet another Italian veteran with giallos, horror, soft-core, comedies, crime and so on. Even if the giallo plotting of the movie turns you off a bit, it's pretty damn cool to see all of these legends in one movie. We even get Iris Peynado, probably best remembered by genre fans as the striking beauty in WARRIORS OF THE WASTELAND (1983). 

Bava said in a 1987 interview that the use of the pseudonym was used for projects that he was hired to direct, not his own personal projects, which puts to rest the old saw that he was embarrassed of the films that bear his pseudonym. That seems to be a North American sentiment that may have originated from the old "Alan Smithee" nom de plume that the DGA allowed to be used on films that had ended up outside of the director's control and credit was unwanted. The general public took this to mean that it was an indicator of shame and an inferior product. And really, unless you are a hard-core contrarian, you have to admit that Lamberto manages to work in some great camera setups that modern low-budget movie makers would never even bother with. As it is, I find that in the old-man-shouting-at-cloud phase of my life, MONSTER SHARK is a fun little movie. I mean, you could do a hell of a lot worse. Have you seen Blumhouse's WOLF MAN (2025)?