The frenzy was immediate, the clones numerous and fast, sometimes bothering to swap the shark for some other animals, waterbound or not.
But the mid-70s were also the period for exploitation cinema blooming into grindhouse theathers and drive-ins, and among them there was also the “Mondo movie” craze… well, it was that trend of exploitation still surviving almost 2 decades after the 1962 film Mondo Cane (an italian idiom translating roughly to “Doggone World/The World’s Gone To The Dogs”).
While the cannibal craze was indeed at its peak, with good ol’ Cannibal Holocaust releasing just 1 year prior, director and producer Jean-Patrick Lebel figured you could mix the “killer shark” and “shockumentary” subgenre in one, so the world was given Great White Death.
And you know it’s gonna be a good one when they have not one but two different title “sequences” that still use the same title.
There’s not much to explain, as said this is a “mondo movie” style approach to a shark film, so we have Glenn Ford narrate the whole thing while on search for the king of the sharks, the Great White.
Which is just an excuse to see fake death scenes, again, just a shark themed Faces Of Death, and to use documentary style sequences of people living in jungle with their loincloths and bamboo boat , underwater footage or stock sequences of people minding their business while at the beach or real disasters like roads cracked in two by something, or some ethnical nudity.
It’s almost reassuring in a way, because the industry was already doing “shockumentary” exploitation crap like these in 30s, but with monkeys and the extra racism of the era… well, actually even that hasn’t changed much by the ’70s, as this is full of footage of tribal black skinned men doing some ritualistic dances, with the narrator telling of their shark based folk tales and calling them primitive mumbo jumbo, basically. So really we barely moved on.
And as with those old “etnographic nudies & crudies”, the “documentary” label really is nothing more than a pretense to slap together stock footage of nature, native tribal rituals and random crap until you have enough to edit these into a 90 minutes affair (as the setup excuses the need to come up with a plot), while speaking mostly generic stuff about the “wonder unexplored in the oceans” or outright bollocks, as at one point Glenn Ford speaks of sharks as “pirates”…. maybe he was a World Noble in disguise that escaped being pancaked into the ground by Straw Hat Luffy or his allies.
Even stupider, one of the movie alternate titles is indeed Sharks: Pirates Of The Deep.
Sorry, my mind wandered because there’s just so much i can take of liturgical tribal dances that go on and on, the classic go-to padding material these films are forged from, but i’ll say that, despite everything is obvious as etnographic as a chinese fortune cookie, the pretense of it being an actual documentary is decently kept up, there are some decent and interesting scenes, some actually giving some historical insight… among the many dull, dull ones.
And if the death scenes with sharks are obviosuly faked…. the animal cruelty is not, not that i expected otherwise, but it’s there and is about as pleasant as ever, meaning none, and it’s worth pointing out because honestly i get why people avoid movies like these on that principle.
Poor sharks.
The real question is if this one is gonna have more or or less ridiculous death scenes than Brutes & Savages‘s hilarious “crocodile in da pool” one?
The answer is no because Great White Death actually skews more on being an actual documentary, and there’s no obvious staged recreation of shark attacks, as these are just real footage of shark attacking underwater cameras and biting dive cages, we have people recollecting about losing a limb or suffering from a shark attack, but it’s done via dialogue, so this movie actually ends up being a touch classier than one would be expecting given it being called a “mondo movie”.
Which is odd in itself, as it goes against the sensationalist nature of the genre, this is surprisingly not really sleazy, still obviously made to cash into the Jaws craze with the “documentary but not really angle” as quick as they could, but the Glenn Ford narration does help giving it a semblance of legitimacy and i have to give credit to the fact that – aside all the stupid “pirate sharks” talk– it doesn’t paint sharks just as finned Jason Vorhees of the seas, it does instead talk of them in a more naunced fashion than expected, and for its time it ends up being somewhat educational.
So i can see people not caring much at the time, this isn’t quite as exploitation coded as most people would have liked, nor its a proper documentary, so it becomes clear why Great White Death was bound to eventually being salvaged and thrown back into the abyss, it’s not unwatchable…it’s just a subpar film of this kind that no one would have even considered if it wasn’t specifically about sharks, but also not bad enough to be hilarious crap like the aforementioned Brutes & Savages.
It’s one of those stuck in an awkward limbo between somewhat educational material and a proper sleazy shockumentary/mondo movie , though you’ll still see real dead sharks being ripped open for science, in detail, and in an ironic twist of fate the movie legacy was some of it footage being reused in Faces Of Death II later down the line.
Kinda dull and hard to recommend to anyone else besides the encrusted, really starved shark movie buffs, i can’t deny it was kind of a slog and obviously padded with those fuckin scenes of tribalistic ritual dances and chants, actual animal cruelty and real dead shark being sliced open, so…
Wise Cafe (International) 