One of the many gifts Jaws bestowed upon this undeserving world was the creation of a brand new film mode: the Jaws rip-off. Mere months after the film’s release in 1975, this nascent genre exploded across movie screens. Producers and studios attempted to reproduce the Jaws magic by getting kinky with the “formula”. Some kept the shark (like Mako: The Jaws of Death, Great White, Tintorera), others swapped out the Carcharodon carcharias for other surly members of the animal kingdom (Grizzly, Barracuda, Tentacles).
But the most successful entries were those that forsook pretension for humor and satire; ones that were loud and proud to crib from the Jaws playbook. The Citizen Kane of Jaws clones remains the Joe Dante directed Piranha. (Not coincidentally, Piranha and the equally enjoyable Alligator both come well aided with self-aware, satiric, and slightly meta screenplays from the great John Sayles.)
Piranha was so popular that Mr. Steven Spielberg himself roundly praised the film as “the best of the Jaws rip-offs”. Spielberg and Dante went on to have a long collaboration on films like Gremlins and Twilight Zone: The Movie. But Piranha would also net Dante the interest of mega-producer Dino De Laurentiis, the man (and cash register) behind another Jaws copy-and-paste, Orca.
Starring Dumbledore #1, Richard Harris, Orca is a sort of Free Willy story, but featuring buckets more carnage, leg biting, and a truly soul-splintering scene in which the title animal’s mate aborts a whale fetus onto the blood strewn deck of a fishing trawler after succumbing to her violent death throes. Because Orca mistakes itself for Othello and gets bogged down in it’s own self-importance, the movie never truly swims to the finish.
Despite being only a minor box-office success, this didn’t stop Signor De Laurentiis from dreaming up a potential sequel, Orca Part II. De Laurentiis went for Dante to helm the picture. As Dante explains, after Piranha, he received many offers to direct similarly themed films. But De Laurentiis pitch had to be the most bat-s#$t.
“Orca is-a crazy! He’s-a-gonna kill everybody!” De Laurentiis said to Dante (colored by the Italian-born producer’s extraordinarily thick accent). In the planned follow-up, the killer whale would take his revenge-seeking from the icy waters of Newfoundland to terra firma itself. “Orca was going to go on land,” Dante explained, “and kill people and leave seaweed at the scene of the crime.”
Go ahead and re-read that sentence again.
Here, I’ll even type it again for you: “Orca was going to go on land and kill people and leave seaweed at the scene of the crime.”
Dante concluded, “This actually didn’t strike me as a particularly viable idea. I managed to talk him out of it.”
Ultimately, the killer whale’s land-based crime spree never made the backstroke to celluloid, and Dante would get involved in another aborted Jaws project (National Lampoon’s Jaws 3, People 0). But this writer can’t help but wonder what the butterfly effect might have been had Orca Part II become a reality. Would we have Jaws 5 on Venus? Alligator 3 meets Santa Claus? Maybe the Grizzly follow-up, Grizzly Goes 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, that all those brown bear enthusiasts have long clamored for.
We’ll allow fan fiction to author those intrepid tales.
I highly recommend you check out the 2016 Joe Dante episode of Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast (and the podcast in general). If you want to discover more un-produced Jaws projects, then check out John LeMay’s easy-breezy book on the subject, Jaws Unmade: The Lost Sequels, Prequels, Remakes, and Rip-offs.
-T.Z.
No comments:
Post a Comment