Shark!: Samuel Fuller

Why is this movie entitled Shark!? This film is about a trio of Westerners searching for sunken treasure in the Red Sea. There are certainly shark attacks, but they only happen at the very beginning and the very end of the film. I think there may have been one more attack somewhere in the middle, but I can't be bothered to go back and check. That's because Shark! is an unwatchable, incoherent mess of a film. I feel terrible for Samuel Fuller, the original director. Apparently, Fuller quit the film after the production studio insisted on using the fact that a stuntman was accidentally killed during shooting as part of the advertising. Afterwards, Fuller demanded that his name be taken off the film. But his plea fell on deaf ears. And so, one of the greatest American filmmakers of the Twentieth century will forever be credited with this cinematic abomination. Every single aspect of this film is terrible. It seems that after Fuller left the film, the production studio hired a bunch of invalid monkeys to finish it. The sound quality is so bad that you could swear that a deaf-mute recorded the audio. The cinematography and editing is so confusing and disjointed that it feels like it was created and compiled while the production crew had their eyes closed. Gigantic swaths of the film are swallowed up in opaque day-for-night and murky underwater shots. In conclusion, Shark! is a film that never should have seen the light of day. And I'm not just saying that because it stands as a black mark on Fuller's filmography.

2/10