To top off the Discovery channel’s annual Shark Week, I offer you another column of weird shark movies. Frankly, I’m amazed that people keep making them and that I keep finding older movies that I’d missed in earlier columns — such as 1976’s “Mako: The Jaws of Death,” made to capitalize on the success of Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” released a year earlier. (Just look how quickly shark movies went weird after Spielberg’s box-office success.
) Richard Jaeckel, usually a supporting tough-guy actor, stars as a Vietnam vet whose life had been saved by a Mako shark(!); then a Filipino shaman gives him a talisman that protects him when he is in the water with sharks(!!); then he develops a telepathic connection with sharks(!!!); then an unethical scientist and a strip-club owner try to use his special abilities for their own ends (including mixing sharks with strippers)(!!!!). Finally, he defends the exploited sharks by sending them to kill everybody else(!!!!!), but oops(!!!!!!), he loses that talisman, and, well, you can guess what happens. Even earlier this millennium, I’ve somehow missed some ridiculously weird examples, such as 2012’s “Jaws of the Shark” from Sweden.
That may sound like a straightforward shark thriller, but it’s actually about a genetically engineered murderous shark-man, and if that’s not bad enough, he gets his hands (fins? fands?) on a chainsaw. IMDb calls it a comedy, which suggests that that’s what the filmmakers intended. .
