| Great White | |
|---|---|
US poster |
|
| Directed by | Enzo G. Castellari |
| Produced by | Edward L. Montoro Ugo Tucci |
| Written by | Marc Princi |
| Starring | James Franciscus Vic Morrow Micaela Pignatelli Joshua Sinclair Giancarlo Prete Stefania Girolami Goodwin |
| Music by | Morton Stevens (USA) |
| Distributed by | Film Ventures International (USA) |
| Release date(s) | March 5th, 1982 (USA) |
| Running time | 88 min. |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | English/Italian |
Great White (a.k.a. The Last Shark) is a 1980 Italian horror film directed by Enzo G. Castellari and starring James Franciscus and Vic Morrow. The film is extremely similar to Steven Spielberg's Jaws.
Contents |
An enormous and angry 35-foot Great White Shark begins attacking humans when they build a beach just for swimmers by Port Harbor, a coastal town. Despite repeated attacks, the mayor does nothing to stop it as he doesn't want tourists to hear about it and stop coming. Enter the heroes: Peter Benton (James Franciscus), a novelist who wrote a book about sharks, and Ron Hamer (Vic Morrow), an old seadog who has a personal grudge against this shark and wants it dead. They sail into the middle of the ocean to save stranded people and stop the monster. Eventually, Ron drowns, but Peter, remembering the explosives inside his wetsuit, feeds Ron's corpse to the shark and ignites it, blowing the shark to pieces. Peter swims to Port Harbor and returns home.
Universal Pictures sued to have the release of this movie in North America blocked, accusing the makers of Great White of plagiarism of Jaws.[1] The studio won the case, and the movie was pulled from North American theaters shortly after its release. It has never been legally released on video in North America, nor shown on North American television, though bootlegs are regularly available on the internet.
The film was briefly released theatrically in the United States by Film Ventures International in March 1982.[2]
The film has a cult following in the United States because of its brief 1982 theatrical release and a proliferation of publicity materials, especially stills showing the titular shark's enormous prop, many times larger than any actual known species, on the internet.
The film was released on DVD in its native Italy in 2007[1] and on May 21, 2008 it was released on DVD in Sweden. It wasn't available on any format in the USA until 2011 when Amazon released a video download and a twenty-dollar, burn on demand copy of the film on their site. The disc is burned from a blank one upon ordering, but still, can't be bought in stores unless bootlegged. Recently, a Blu Ray was announced for release by DVD Rulers, an independent DVD-R/BD-R releasing company. The Blu Ray is scheduled to be released January 10th, 2012.[3]
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||