The Last Shark (1981) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★ 4

  Where Jaws has the iconic score, better acting, and a more interesting story—this one has a cool soundtrack, a mean-looking shark (footage), and an opening with some dude having the time of his life riding some kind of surfing board ship stuff (I’m sure it has a name, but I’m too lazy to look it up).

  The film makes a very minimal attempt to hide its influence. It tweaks a few things so it doesn’t feel like a complete ripoff. Also, like I said, the songs here are pretty cool. The score does sound like your average old Italian score that sounds almost like the Mario soundtrack—you know, the one that doesn’t sound like something you would probably hear in…

• Review by single white femalien

  this title is objectively false there have been many sharks since

• Review by Geoffrey Broomer ★★★½ 7

  I know the term GREATEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME gets thrown around so often it sounds sarcastic……… so let’s do the math.

  -Sued into oblivion by Universal for being too close to JAWS, The Last Shark actually takes a bigger bite out of JAWS 2.
  -Shark design by (georgio) Ferrari
  -Every Enzo G. Castellari episode of Detective Extra Large starts with male models riding skidoos over the opening credits. Here our homoerotic watersport introduction of choice is surfing.
  -A board gets bitten in half, and its rider still manages to hang on for a solid minute.
  -The Mayor’s whole election platform seems to be based on a surfing competition
  -That is MY whole election platform as well...
  -Vic Morrow IS…

• Review by Chris ★★ 18

  This film is so late 70's/Early 80's, even the shark had sideburns.

• Review by Will Sloan

  Spielberg famously didn't show you much of the shark, because it was more powerful in the imagination, and also because it looked fake. With his usual good taste, Enzo G. Castellari takes the opposite approach.

• Review by Lou (rhymes with wow!) ★★★ 5

  I still think the most Jaws like movie is probably Blades from 1989, about a killer lawnmower terrorizing a golfcourse (check that one out.. it's a lot of fun) but this movie certainly comes pretty close in ripping off Steven Spielberg's original.

  There is a scene in the beginning of this movie, where a group of the teens is having fun and they're running in and out of the sea in slow motion. This is alternated with shots of the great white, also in slowmotion and a creepy score is playing in the background. I thought that was real inspired and it achieved the desired effect.

  Later on in the movie there is a scene that I can only describe as:

  SMALL RUBBER SHARK vs. TOY HELICOPTER

  and it was marvelous(-ly bad!) It's just that there's not much of interest happening for the rest of the movie..

• Review by Justin Decloux ★★★ 1

  Cinema is a big fake shark popping out of the water.

• Review by Ian West ★★½

  Sharksploitation day here at the West household (basically just me and my Cat). She gave it two and a half meows.

• Review by Johnny81 ★★★ 7

  Surprisingly competent Jaws rip here from Enzo G. Castellari, although I suppose any shark film is going to look pretty slick in comparison after watching Cruel Jaws.
  More surprising was noticing just how much footage Mattei had lifted from this film. Pretty much any significant (read costly) location shots filmed in this, had been recycled by the meister of lazy, scrimping filmmaking, but just with different inserts/reaction shots. The sense of deja vu was uncanny!
  Even more surprising was that this film did get called up for copyright infringement, getting pulled from screens in North America. It does stick pretty close to Jaws' plot but seems a bit unfair when I bet Mattei was pissing himself when his film got…

• Review by Jason M ★★★½ 2

  If you try to explain to somebody who has no insight into the world of Italian genre cinema that this film got itself banned and pulled from distribution in the US during the eighties for "being too much a Jaws film" they'd think you where an imbecile. But as you know, it did, and there's a bloody good reason for that too. It's a sodding great movie that really is too much of a Jaws movie, at times better.

  No surprises storywise, annual regatta in a few days, governor refuses to listen to local guys plead to call it off due to shark in water, he scoffs it off and ends up with bloody chaos on his hands before begging…

• Review by Gentry ★★

  “There’s something fishy here. I don’t like it.”

  Enzo G in his mockbuster era. Brother, you’ve earned it. If you were an Italian genre film director still working in the 80s, you pretty much had to churn out this chum to survive. It wasn’t pretty, but it did the job. You either aimed for the top spot on the video nasty list like Lucio Fulci or you said “yes, sir” to whatever relatively well-budgeted slop Dino De Laurentiis handed you.

  Or in the case of The Last Shark, you join up with the production tag team of Ugo Tucci and Maurizio Amati, shameless in their attempt to promote this as a legitimate sequel to Jaws in markets they thought they…

• Review by comrade_yui ½ 1

  tarantino can go fuck himself for unironically recommending this film to people