Movie Details
| Title: | Shark! | |
| Director: | Samuel Fuller | |
| Year: | 1969 | |
| Genre: | Pulp | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 10.04.06 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (5)
- The Big Red One
- Forty Guns
- House of Bamboo
- The Steel Helmet
- White Dog
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 10.04.06 | Weird Wednesday | you have to say the title with gusto... SHARK! What's funny is that this isn't really that tense or exciting a movie... certainly not worthy of the exclamation mark in my eyes... but it still had a few notable moments which made watching it worthwhile for me, the largest being that it's a Sam Fuller movie I haven't seen. Less than ten years after he did one of my favorites (Underworld, USA), he's doing this kind of thing... I haven't seen most of his later stuff (except The Big Red One) so it's weird for me to see some Fuller touches transposed to the 70s... it's still fuller, but it's kinda not. anyway, Burt Reynolds is in this... and it's about sunken treasure and there are sharks in the water. That's basically it, but there's also this Sudanese kid called runt and Arthur Kennedy plays an alcoholic doctor. And a stunt man got eaten on film and they left it in. actually they show it twice. and they based their ad campaign off it. which is pretty sleazy... Burt's got a few Fuller one-liners (something about being born by a winch?) and there are some occasional little bits and odd close-ups that make this funny. most of the theater clapped at one point when Burt randomly throws this chicken across the room... like with way more hate than is called for. Personally, my favorite part was when Burt needed a doctor and someone explained "oh, he's upstairs with his weekly DTs" and we hear a scream and cut to Arthur Kennedy wigging out all over the room. Sure it's not exactly The Lost Weekend, but you kind of get the feeling that Kennedy is using some heavy duty sense memory for that scene. Just the idea that he gets them every week, like it's scheduled or something, made me laugh. so it's a pretty typical pulpy adventure/rogue story where everyone's sweating all the time but it's not sweat it's machismo that they're oozing. Even the girl is hardcore and macho... the actual shark "tense" scenes are pretty laughable though by today's standards, and the breezy cool jazz score didn't really help to create any sort of suspense at all. The story goes that the producers took this away from Fuller and butchered the edit to the point where Fuller wanted his name taken off it... so that's the excuse. I found it interesting to watch once and intermittently entertaining, but probably not something I could sit through once a week. OK it's not as bad as the DTs, but still... |
