My latest article at Flashbak ties in with the Beach Week theme on the blog this week.. In particular, I look at the five best knock-offs of Spielberg's Jaws.
Here's a snippet (and url: http://flashbak.com/just-when-you-thought-it-was-safe-to-go-back-to-the-movies-the-5-best-jaws-1975-knock-offs-18474/ )
"In
other posts here, I’ve recall the five best knock-offs of The Exorcist (1973), Star
Wars (1977), and Alien (1979), but another key genre
blockbuster from the 1970s also inspired a rash of imitators: Steven
Spielberg’s Jaws, based on the best-selling novel by Peter Benchley.
From
1975 to 1979, basically, it “wasn’t safe
to go back” to the theater, because every low-budget filmmaker with any
degree of ambition was recreating the watery attacks of Jaws, only with
different aquatic animals, from killer whales to piranha, substituting for the
great white shark.
These
knock-off movies had titles such as Tentacles (1977), Tintorera:
Killer Shark (1975), Barracuda (1978), and Devil
Fish (1978), to name just a few trend-followers.
Sometimes,
really inventive Jaws knock-offs
repeated the precise plot-line of the Spielberg film, but changed settings too. William Girdler’s Grizzly (1976), for
instance, was set at a state park, not at the beach, and deployed a giant
grizzly bear rather than a great white shark as the film’s menace.
So
without further ado, here are the five best Jaws knock-offs of the late 1970s:"
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